Gapless CD playback. Why has this become a "feature" rather than the bleeding obvious?

[2leftears]

What triggered my pondering was the recent thread on the Head-Fi forum here re. the release of the new portable FiiO DM13 and the many discussions posters had with FiiO representatives re. whether or not it featured gapless playback, and FiiO mentioning thay had added gapless playback as a feature (either they really added it or it was just easy marketing on their part after having received numerous queries re. gapless playback):

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/fii...cd-player-dm13-is-officially-released.973241/

Just an update seeing that some here thought I was making a mountain out of a molehill: I revisited the above thread because people have now been able to get their hands on this new player.

So, after all the discussions FiiO had with their users and forum members, reassuring them several times that gapless playback had been added to the player and featuring gapless playback in their advertising, guess what this CD player does NOT do under the firmware version it ships with, not even for regular shop-bought CDs? You guessed it: gapless playback. Many people report erratic gapless playback with one person reporting as much as an occasional 2 second undesired gap added by the player.

Apparently firmware V22 fixes this, but users are advised not to do this firmware update themselves.

Oh, and no stop button ?

TBH, the idea of a new half-decent quality portable CD player is appealing, but I will wait until a later model with all these teething issues ironed out and EU legislation after 2027 forces them to make the battery replaceable.

It also confirms my suspicion that for some drives gapless playback is now a feature that needs to be supported/implemented in software rather than being supported by the drive, even for regular music CDs.