It had to read the TOC first because the compiled program wouldn't know how long the first track of the CD is until it was burned. Once they are storing the TO

It had to read the TOC first because the compiled program wouldn't know how long the first track of the CD is until it was burned. Once they are storing the TOC in memory it's just as easy to do absolute positioning, basically doing the calculation for the drive. It's a bit more work for the developer and slightly more fragile, but it works well enough.