[zombietycho]

I'm getting a iBook in the near future and I thought "Hey, why not get a iPod to go with it? I can use it as a portable HDD if I need and I hear it is a great player". So with that I thought I'd be ripping high-quality AAC for some smooth digital fun. Then someone told me that the AAC codec isn't REALLY gapless (from iTunes). From that conclusion I decided that I'd just rip Wavs. I don't need the intense fidelity, but atleast I'll have gapless. Then someone told me that the iPod doesn't play (Or Wav isn't) gapless either. (Which is why I ditched MP3 in the first place, Dark side of the moon sounds terrible with the little gaps)

So I was wondering..... if I get the iPod, is it worth all the bother with Nero (I read something about gapless playback at Hydrogen Audio)? Or should I think about waiting for a possible iTunes update that will bring us all Gapless funtimes?

I'm a sad and frustrated man...... should I just get a Ihp instead? Or will that even run on the Mac OS?

[brain melt]

 

[PeterR]

WAV playback on the iPod indeed isn't 100% gapless, however the gap is just a few fractions of a second, more like a small hiccup than a pause. Don't find it very annoying (but then I'm still in my first 10 hours of iPod ownership and still very, very excited

)

 

[zombietycho]

Have you tried listening to any albums that are natively completely gapless? I've burnt some CDs of live concert from mp3 to nero, and I still was very annoyed with the slight hicup.

 

[davei]

Quote:

Originally posted by zombietycho Have you tried listening to any albums that are natively completely gapless? I've burnt some CDs of live concert from mp3 to nero, and I still was very annoyed with the slight hicup.

That's a problem with the MP3s. The WAVs need to be cut on exact sector sizes (2352 bytes) or else there'll be a gap no matter what. i.e. if your file falls in between a sector, the burning program will likely add silence to fill in the gap.

There's a specific program out there to cut on sector sizes, but then you need to use another program to put your individual WAVs into one big file, edit out the gaps, then re-cut the files on proper sector boundaries.

 

[WindyCityCy]

What are these gaps you're speaking of? Is it a skip in the music or something else.

 

[Braver]

I was sooo worried about this before going Ipod. but, theres just no way around gaps, unless you go IHP. maybe in the future.

I found that the CD's I listen to the most have seperate tracks, and then it's just no problem. I agree on Dark Side Of The Moon. I'll have to rip that into two "tracks", side one and side two. at a slight hit in batterylife (because the file will be larger than the ipod's buffer), that does solve the problem completely.

and the couple of soundtracks will have to live on my Ipod as big single tracks. but then again, compared to favourites like Porcupine Tree - Recordings and Pink Floyd - Meddle, I hardly ever listen to those anyway.

count the number of gapless albums you have. I found the number to be smaller and less significant than I thought at first.

@ windycitycy: for some reason, with mp3's, tracks don't flow from one to another as seamlessly as they do on CD. usually tracks don't flow into eachother, but sometimes, like on DSOTM, they doo, and it sounds like the mp3 player "skips".

 

[NewSc2]

My friend used to record gapless albums in gapless mp3 format. Don't know exactly how he did it just that it can be done. It makes the whole album just 1 mp3 though, so I'm pretty sure you can't skip around tracks. If you're really desperate, it could be used though.

 

[PeterR]

Quote:

Originally posted by zombietycho Have you tried listening to any albums that are natively completely gapless?

Sure, that's what I was talking about...

 

[Braver]

Quote:

Originally posted by NewSc2 My friend used to record gapless albums in gapless mp3 format. Don't know exactly how he did it just that it can be done. It makes the whole album just 1 mp3 though, so I'm pretty sure you can't skip around tracks. If you're really desperate, it could be used though.

like I said, that's a good workaround. no skipping tracks, but someone fretting about gaps is surely not going to skip tracks?

 

[bangraman]

That's true. And the iPod navigation makes scrolling through a long MP3 track less painful than many players.

 

[WindyCityCy]

I thought a few of my CDs were ripped poorly and that the skips I was hearing (always where 1 song flows into another - usually a few seconds into the next song) were a result of this. Now it seems that it is more likely the gap issue. I see this most often on trance/mixed albums. Originally I had ripped them using CDex alt-preset-extreme, then re-ripped using EAC/RazorLAME/ID3-TagIT. The results were exactly the same with the skips/gaps at certain song transitions. Is this likely what is occuring?

 

[karmypolitics]

how about aac files? how does the ipod handle those in respect to gapless playback?

 

[gorman]

I heard the Karma does gapless mp3s... but I'm still deciding about my DAP, so this is not first hand experience...

 

[morphineheart]

First on my wishlist of features for the next iPod firmware upgrade: crossfade. It seems to me you could program a crossfade of 1 second or even .5 seconds to effectively get rid of the gaps between songs. I even like the more dramatic 5- or 10-second crossfades you can set up in Itunes, although it doesn't work (aesthetically speaking) on some albums.

It seems like a no-brainer feature, especially since Apple already provides it in iTunes. Or am I overlooking something?

 

[piper1124]

The Karma does do gapless playback of MP3's and also OggVorbis. There is a really good site to compare the gapless playback of the Karma and the iPod which can be found at: http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

It also talks about some strategies for getting gapless playblack on non-Karma devices.

-piper