[matheis]

hello!!!

i listen to alot of music with continuous flow from song to song and am wondering which hd-dap's support seamless or near seamless playback. any help would be appreciated, as it's definitely a factor in my decision whether to supplement md with mp3 or not.

thanks!
nikolaus

 

[blessingx]

People are going to disagree a bit here on which portables have a greater or lesser gap between songs, but a gap is a limitation of MP3's. They are not seamless. There are work arounds (some LAME builds have a "-nogap" option if the player supports it - as far as I know no portables do), but otherwise if you use separate tracks you're going to get some gaps. You could always rip the entire album as a single track, thus avoiding the problem, but there may be battery issues with big files. The Karma is rumored to have crossfade option, so there may be another work around there. AAC's have the same problem. Not sure about WMA's.

 

[austonia]

Quote:

Originally posted by blessingx People are going to disagree a bit here on which portables have a greater or lesser gap between songs, but a gap is a limitation of MP3's. They are not seamless. There are work arounds (some LAME builds have a "-nogap" option if the player supports it - as far as I know no portables do), but otherwise if you use separate tracks you're going to get some gaps. You could always rip the entire album as a single track, thus avoiding the problem, but there may be battery issues with big files. The Karma is rumored to have crossfade option, so there may be another work around there. AAC's have the same problem. Not sure about WMA's.

uh.. just wanted to make this a little less confusing for people.

its not the MP3 files with a gap. I mean its not internal anyway. the usual way albums are ripped from CD, is for each track to be cut to a seperate file.

some Mp3 players don't start the next track right after the previous one, which is why a "gap" is detected.

but, some players can start tracks ring after another, like my iRivier 390T (flash-based player) has like a 1/4 second gap between songs.

or like blessing said you can rip a CD to one continuous file. Or if you have Mp3's that some else ripped, you can "join" seperate tracks into one file too using software to splice them.

 

[ian]

If you tracks are ripped properly, the Karma is seamless. Even if they aren't ripped properly, you can set crossfade to 1 second and they will still sound seamless.

 

[blessingx]

Thanks Austonia, I was a little confusing earlier. But the one thing I think we disagree about (from this and a previous thread), is that it IS an internal element of the MP3 files. It's a limitation of MP3's played on anything, and a criticism often leveled at MP3's. They are inherently non-gapless (with the small exception of the above workarounds - WinAmp and Foobar being examples of various degrees of success). I believe it's the way meta data is stored in the file, but I could be wrong there.

Either way we agree you're going to get some gap, either shorter like the iRiver or longer like the iPod. There's the gap introduced by the MP3 file, then there's the gap tacked on by the technical limitations of the player (hard disk spin, buffer workings, etc.).

Just did a search over at Hydrogen Audio. While MP3, AAC, and WMA are non-gapless, WMA9 (no portables currently support it) is gapless. So interestingly is Ogg. So Matheis there is hope. A great thing about "MP3" players as opposed to MiniDisc's, is you often have various encoding formats. Use MD and you're going to use ATRAC (in one form of another). Buy a MP3 player and potentially you'll never use MP3 on it.

 

[matheis]

well...could y'all point me to some software to try to work around the gap 'problem'? i guess i've never had to consider it before, but now that i am a 'joiner' type program sound like it'd be useful to me. help?
thank
nikolaus