[Ross]

I've been having some problems ripping and playing CDs gaplessly. When playing back on Windows Media, there is always a gap between tracks. Switching to Foobar, the gap disappears, but there is a noticeable click between tracks instead. I have been ripping using CDex. Is there a way to rip and play back without either a gap or a click?

 

[Necros]

Rip as one big file?

 

[Helter Skelter]

Helps to know what format you're ripping to. You see, MP3 doesn't support gapless playback unless it's encoded with a recent version of LAME (which unfortunately is not included with the most recent version of CDex). Try using CDex and ripping to a format that supports gapless natively, like ogg vorbis (q6 or q7 is a good compression setting to use, comparable to LAME --alt-preset extreme in my opinion). Foobar should have no issues playing those back gaplessly.

I forget if WMA supports gapless playback.

 

[Ross]

Thanks for the replies, but I'm aware that MP3 is not gapless. I'm talking about ripping WAV files, which I would have thought would be gapless (although Ogg files made from the WAV files also have gaps in them). Am I doing something wrong in the original WAV rip?

 

[Helter Skelter]

Now that is odd. Yes, WAV (not to mention every other lossless format) should be gapless. Not sure what's going on there. As an alternative, you could rip the disc to one giant WAV file (or your lossy/lossless codec of choice), and use a cuesheet with foobar. EAC supports ripping this way to make things easy.

You really shouldn't be getting gaps as it is, though. Something tells me that the problem lies in your player or ripper settings somewhere.

 

[Zweroboi]

Lossless IS gapless by default. Because it doesn't add extra samples to a file, that cause these gaps with, for instance, mp3 playback.

For really gapless playback (even with lossless files) the player should be configured to prebuffer some data of the next file, to avoid the gap caused by the initial file-open-read-decode procedure.

In Winamp DirectSound Oputput plugin there is a separate setting for that, and when prebuffering is set to 0 there is audible gap when playing flacs and wavs, but with 200ms buffer it's lossless.

Unfortinately I don't have Foobar at the current PC, but there might be some similar settings in the DS output plug-in.

 

[stiben]

Yes in Foobar there is the Gap killer DSP which has 2 settings, maximum gap length and smooth cut position.