The creator of mp32dao is Joe Steward. He had the idea of track padding. It seems he's not maintaining mp32dao anymore, or at least I'm unable to contact him.
My name is Giuseppe Corbelli but I bet you saw it on the very first page of this document ;-). I made some hacking on the original program adding CD-Text support and internal mp3 decoding. I also added some more checks and rewrote all the stuff to improve readability and modularity. You should not think of finding a good programming example, though :-). You can contact me at <cowo@lugbs.linux.it>.