Add gapless playback capability!!

[bonejob]

I just downloaded your program and used it to stitch together album files from a 4-CD opera set - 62 tracks in all. Many of the tracks - half of them or more - transition from one to the next without any silence between them. I used EAC/LAME to rip them, which supports gapless MP3 encoding. But very few MP3 players, either software PC-based or portables like the iPod, will play these files without audible discontinuities between them. Only Foobar2000 will play them back gaplessly. My car CD player will play MP3 CDs, but doesn't support gapless playback either.

I was hoping that your program could stitch these tracks together into a gapless whole, but alas, it does not. The gaps are less noticeable in the album file, but they are there nonetheless. This is an issue not only with operas but with CDs of any live concerts where the sound is uninterrupted from track to track. Surely I am not the only one who thinks these gaps are a P.I.T.A., am I?

So far, I have found only two workarounds, neither of which is ideal: One, I can manually edit out the silences between tracks in a program like Adobe Audition or Audacity, but that involves a lot of time and re-encoding, which compromises the quality somewhat. Second, I can rip twice - once into gapless tracks for home PC consumption, and again as a single-file disk image for the car - again a time-consuming chore.

If I could encode - ONCE - with EAC/LAME into separate, gapless tracks, and then use a program like yours, to stitch these tracks together for automotive or iPod use - seemlessly without manual editing or re-encoding, I would be MOST happy!

[Kurgan]

Hi Bonejob,

I'm nobody "official," I'd just like to comment on your post, if that's ok.

I use "wrapping" programs for exactly the same thing as you're describing. I'm an audio drama enthusiast, and those are almost always seemless segments, from beginning to end (occasionally you get a brief silence between episodic sections). However, I've not been having the problem you are. The tracks do play seemlessly once I've placed them in the Album. Even old AlbumWrap achieved this for me. If I play the tracks one-by-one, though, in a standard playlist, yep, there are audible gaps.

I offer this as evidence that the problem may lie elsewhere, and the one thing that comes to mind would be the ripping software's config, where many of them have a "Remove silence between tracks" option. Could that maybe be the culprit? Any chance that got switched off by mistake?

Hope that is of use to you. Good luck.

PS: If you want to have someone help you test it, feel free to PM me and give me a link to a couple of sequential tracks. I can do the same, if you'd like, and you could test a couple of tracks that I know play seemlessly for me. Might help narrow things down a bit.

[makeitone]

hi there,

rather than ask you questions about your mp3s, let me give you two examples:
1 - take an mp3 track, split into eg 4 mp3's, ensure all 4 parts have no ID3 tags. Use MakeitOne to stitch them together to make an album. Play the album - the track sounds exactly the same as the original, the mp3 less the MakeitOne header, is the same as the original mp3, the difference is that MakeitOne has enough information in the header to unpack them later. There are no hops, skips or gaps.

2 - take an mp3 track, split into eg 4 mp3's, ensure all 4 parts HAVE an ID3 tag. Use MakeitOne to stitch them together to make an album. Play the album - between each track will be a hiccup as the decoder gets confused by the embedded tag.

so, the conclusion is: if you want seamless playback, remove all tags that the CD ripper has put into each track. Be sure that the CD ripper has not padded the mp3 with any silence. You will have gapless playback.

thanks

[nerys]

For Audiobooks this is fine but for anything else this is a non starter sadly. The only mp3 that I "want" gapless are also the only mp3's that NEED tags to be usable.

So no tags really limits the usefullness for music stuff.

SO that brings the next question. An idea to solve this would be for YOUR program to "strip" the files of all ID3 information and "store" this information for each and every mp3 and then "repply" the ID3 information when it regurgitates the files later. I mean all info all tags all categories all embedded images etc.. etc..

Is this possible?

[makeitone]

Hi there,

it's an interesting idea but removing the tags from the MP3 and storing them is not how MakeitOne was intended, it is important to maintaint the original structure of the MP3 file, no modification.

[nerys]

well it kind of does not matter if it can not do what people want ehh ? :-)

Just an idea an option to strip the id3 information and store it inside the file format and then reintegrate it again later would SOLVE the gapless playback problem while retaining the mp3 tag information.

Its not really "that" big a deal though I guess you could just offer 2 archives. one with tag info and one for gapless.