Spliceless editing of a read/write optical medium

An optical read/write drive such as a DVD+RW drive writes a block of new data to a read/write medium by locating an edit bit in the block of data that has already been written to the medium, and writing the block of new data to the medium, beginning or ending at the edit bit. The edit bit may be chosen to avoid errors arising from polarity conflicts between data already written to the disc and the new data. The edit bit could be, for example, a differing transition bit in a sync codeword of a modulation-encoded block.