[craiglester]

Part 1:

I have an ipod Video 60 gb (5G?), and I'm having issues with it playing albums gaplessly. I have music loaded on it that was rippied in Itunes, EAC and dBPoweramp. I have tried ALAC, MP3 and AAC and I cannot get it to play gaplessly with any consistency. ALAC was terrible and left a small gap between every track, no matter what software it was ripped with. AAC and MP3 work better, but every few songs, there's a gap between tracks, but not always the same songs. It seems as though the ipod is having trouble loading up the next song quickly enough. So, after all the preamble, is there anything I can do to fix this.? I believe all 3 codecs (ALAC, AAC & MP3) can be played back gaplessly on that model of ipod, but where am I going wrong? I've tried with and without the "part of a gapless album" switch in itunes, and have tried loading the files using Media Monkey also, but cannot get it to be consistent. Oh all the files play flawlessly om my PC, completely gapless. Is there a setting I'm missing on the ipod? (Oh I tried a Defrag on the ipod and it helped a bit, but i still get occasional gaps)

Part 2:

I'm thinking one of the flash based ipods, (probably the touch) might be a solution. If it's the disk in the ipod - i suspect that's the culprit here, then do the flash based ipods load the next track instantly or at least fast enough that gapless playback is possible with some degree of consistency?

Oh, and has anyone any experience with any e-book reader on the touch?

 

[shigzeo]

i am not sure what to say. my mates 5.5 worked flawlessly and my touch, my wonder wife's nano and every other ipod i have heard has done it flawlessly. perhaps yours is slow? you could also rip to aac audiobook and make chaptermarks for every song if you are desperate and don't want to spend more money.

i am a gapless fanatic: without it i am unnerved and feel it pointless to listen so i understand your dilemma

 

[4saken]

I got a question too. Is it necessary to tick the gapless setting in each song on their "tags" page to get it to play gapless on the iPod? Or does the player do it by default? Seems a bit irritating to need to tick it every time you have a new album.

 

[shigzeo]

mine does not need it

 

[pata2001]

Are you using the latest version of iTunes and/or firmware?
Sync your iPod with iTunes (or fully back it up), and do a restore. Sometimes restoring from scratch can fix a lot of weird issues.

As for gapless on iPods, I can only confirm Lame MP3, iTunes MP3, and iTunes AAC to be perfectly gapless on my 5G, 5.5G, 2G+3G+4G nano, and 1G Touch. No issues. I did mention on other threads that I have an issue of the 4G nano skipping, albeit extremely rare and un-reproducible, presumably due to a more aggressive power saving.

Gapless checkbox in iTunes only affects crossfading on those tracks (if checked, crossfading is disabled), not related to actual gapless playback.

 

[WorldWithoutE]

You actually have to use iTunes to be able to have gapless playback as the player itself is not capable of doing it. It makes use of iTunes to process the files during syncing and stuff. Also, do a restore, that might help.

 

[ILikeMusic]

My 2G Touch gives good gapless. On rare occasion there may be the slightest perceptible glitch, but generally it's close to perfect. All of my library is LAME-encoded MP3 and none of it was encoded with iTunes.

Also, the 'gapless' settings in the track properties in iTunes has nothing at all to do with gapless on the player. The iTunes option merely tells iTunes to not crossfade those tracks during playback on the PC. As to whether iTunes does any other special prep of the file during transfer I don't know...

 

[craiglester]

Well, a little experimentation and research goes a long way it seems

So, I grabbed some flacs - nice and gapless, converted to WMA lossless (as itunes wont read the flacs). Then dropped the WMA Lossless into itunes, and let it do it's thing converting to AAC 256K.. and voila.. Pretty reliably gapless playback when sync'd to the ipod.

Having said that, occasionally i find it cuts the end off a song - if it does that, i delete the album off the ipod and re sync it.. seems to fix the issue.. i think that might be a file corruption issue, but im surprised itunes doesnt notice it.. I probably should use a better cable, or no hub or something obscure..

I'll try some MP3's when I've converted these 10,000 flacs to WMA Lossless

(It's a copy of them - I'm keeping the flacs as flacs for archiving)


On a side note.. sheesh AAC encoding (to 256Kbps) is SLOW.. one track at a time.. I'm Used to DB poweramp and it's 4 tracks at a time goodness.. this is gonna take a while to import these

 

[pata2001]

On another note, if the track is not gapless due to poor encoding/encoding error (some encoders intentionally left some noise/huge gaps at the end of the track), there's another workaround. In track properties, option screen, you can tell iTunes the exact start/stop time of the track. Simply modify those by a couple of miliseconds can sometime work.

 

[ILikeMusic]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pata2001 /img/forum/go_quote.gif On another note, if the track is not gapless due to poor encoding/encoding error (some encoders intentionally left some noise/huge gaps at the end of the track), there's another workaround. In track properties, option screen, you can tell iTunes the exact start/stop time of the track. Simply modify those by a couple of miliseconds can sometime work.

The gaps aren't really caused by an encoding error per se but rather by a property that is inherent in many lossy formats, that is they package data in frames and will pad the end of a track with some number of milliseconds of silence to fill the last frame of the file if necessary. Players capable of gapless playback utilize software techniques to truncate the silence that appears at the end of many/most tracks.

And BTW, any and all 'gapless', end of track, etc. settings in iTunes have nothing to do with gapless playback in the player itself, these settings only affect how iTunes plays the tracks on a PC.

 

[pata2001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ILikeMusic /img/forum/go_quote.gif The gaps aren't really caused by an encoding error per se but rather by a property that is inherent in many lossy formats, that is they package data in frames and will pad the end of a track with some number of milliseconds of silence to fill the last frame of the file if necessary. Players capable of gapless playback utilize software techniques to truncate the silence that appears at the end of many/most tracks.

I know that. I'm talking about bad encoders (mainly old ones) that actually put extra noise at the end/beginning of the tracks. Even iTunes think the noise is part of the music.

 

[scompton]

I didn't realize that they added gapless play back to the 5G. Are you sure that it can play gapless?

 

[Punnisher]

Quote:

Originally Posted by WorldWithoutE /img/forum/go_quote.gif You actually have to use iTunes to be able to have gapless playback as the player itself is not capable of doing it. It makes use of iTunes to process the files during syncing and stuff. Also, do a restore, that might help.

In my experience this isn't true, at least for my 3g Nano. I loaded a Tool album using Winamp and gapless worked like a charm.

Quote:

Originally Posted by scompton /img/forum/go_quote.gif I didn't realize that they added gapless play back to the 5G. Are you sure that it can play gapless?

The 5g can play gapless.

 

[craiglester]

further experimentation makes me think it might have been a corrupted itune DB..

I removed it, and rebuilt it with the files in the pod using foobars ipod plugin.. worked "quite" well, tiniest gap between tracks.. so.. removed the files, and re added them from foobar, using the original flacs - perfect, but a bit slow..

anyway.. after that i kinda gave up for the night and just dumped the rest of the music on there using itunes for speed..

and it play gaplessly, perfectly.. go figure.

This inconistentcy is kinda annoying, but it's working now so I'm leaving it as is.

I think I'll get the wife to get me a touch, and ideas if a bigger capacity is dues anytime soon?

 

[LFC_SL]

Re: [Stupid] Technology

When I applied the firmware update to my 4G Nano, "rotate to enter coverflow" detection became very flaky, to the point that I resorted to entering coverflow via menu selection -_- Also gapless wasn't working and I used crossfade

Finally got around to reformatting the thing (with current firmware ver.). And rotate to coverflow is perfect. But odd thing about the gapless... not working. Switching on audio crossfade, the crossfade does not work but gapless works

Not returning it. I'm taking what I can lol