Gapless playback not supported on iPod Classic

*The article contains a section at the end: "Supported iPod Models" - and iPod Classic is NOT listed! I'm sure this section is new to the article - I don't remember seeing it before.*

That section has been there since gapless playback was introduced. That section was to make sure that anyone with an earlier model was aware that only the latest models (as were available at that time) were supported. The article was last updated in January 2007 but the iPod Classic wasn't introduced until September/October 2007.

You're welcome, I'm glad that was of help. Take care.

I don't have an answer to your problem but I can confirm that the iPod Classic certainly does support gapless playback.

I've just been listening to "Abbey Road" without any of the annoying gaps in the transition between tracks.

With regard to the article you refer to, I asked for this to be updated to include the new iPod models (L4/5 forum members have access to an area where we can ask for this) a few weeks ago, but so far no response.

I think it might be some time before that article is corrected (judging by a previous request of mine made almost a year ago asking for another out of date article to be updated and nothing has been done). 😟

Hi

How and when did your rip these tracks? I listen to a lot of gapless (and longish) tracks on the Classic, all at 320 kbps mp3 or aac, never had an issue. I ripped all tracks with iTunes, however only since version 7.5 or something. You could consider re-ripping...

Matko

Matko D wrote:
Hi

How and when did your rip these tracks? I listen to a lot of gapless (and longish) tracks on the Classic, all at 320 kbps mp3 or aac, never had an issue. I ripped all tracks with iTunes, however only since version 7.5 or something. You could consider re-ripping...

Matko

Yep, I agree. My scenario too. I have many gapless albums, some ripped at 320kbps in both AAC and mp3 format with quite a few of the tracks of a long length (Grateful Dead anyone?!).

Never an issue playing these gapless on the Classic.

As they say... it works for me.

Most of the time when I've spotted a missing gapless effect it's been becuase the option wasn't selected in the first place, but occasionaly I've had to force iTunes to reanalyse the tracks by selecting the album, gettng info. setting gapless to No, saving the changes then setting gapless to Yes again.

If, as you seem to imply, the presence of a gap occurs sometimes & not others when listening to the same transition, then perhaps it's not so much a fault with the gapless mechanism per se, but relates to the power saving strategy of the iPod. This will read in data to fill a buffer & then put the hard drive to sleep. It then has to restart the hard drive to read the next chunk of data, before the existing cache is exhausted. How long it will take to bring the drive back up to speed, seek the correct locataion and perform a successful read will depend on many factors, e.g. physical motion of the iPod at the time, how fragmented the data that is being read is etc. There must be an algothim in the iPod that schedules the next disk read in an effort to provide for continuous playback, but also to minimise battery use, but since these cannot be predicted with absolute certaintly it must be possible for it to get it wrong occasionaly. I suspect that with higher bitrates & larger files you increase the chances of there being a problem with this strategy. With this in mind you might expect to get the occasional broken transiton, likewise you might sometimes get a small pause within a very long piece that's unrelated to a gapless transiton or momentry freeze frame during video playback etc. What happens if straight after you notice such a glitch you scan to the last few seconds of the first track? My guess is you will get a smooth transition. Defragging the iPod may improve matters...

tt2

Just so we're clear, setting gapless to yes or no should have no affect on the presence gapless playback on the iPod. The setting in iTunes is only for iTunes and indicates that crossfading should be ignored when playing a live album, for instance. From iTunes help:

+Some CDs, such as live concert albums and classical albums, are meant to be played straight through, with no fading between the songs (or tracks). If you turn on Crossfade Playback (to fade songs in and out), you can have iTunes automatically turn it off when you play these albums.+

Albums such as Abbey Road should play gapless automatically on the iPod (assuming you have a model that supports it). I have not enabled this option on any of my albums, but I still have gapless playback on all that should.

Regarding the issue with long high bit-rate tracks, perhaps it is related to the smaller cache in the Classic (32MB vs 64MB in the gen5).

Here's the relevant artitcle and while I take your point about not being able to turn gapless playback on or off what is relevant is that iTunes "performs gapless playback analysis" when importing tracks or if you disable & renable this option. I don't know about the AAC format but MP3 is based on fixed frame sizes and wasn't originally designed to support gapless playback. Any media player must perform some kind of analysis of the audio information in order to present a gapless transition and it would appear that this is carried out in iTunes rather than on-the-fly in the iPod. I recently imported Mike Oldfield's Music of the Spheres which I'd ripped using, dare I say it, Windows Media Player (faster & more tag details). The first time I played it on my iPod there were unexpected gaps. I can't recall now whether this was already marked as gapless or not but whichever it was forcing iTunes to reanalyse the tracks & resyncing cured the problem.

tt2

The article is essentially the same as the iTunes help file. I do not use crossfade, but I was under the assumption that it only applied to iTunes (not the iPod).

I knew about the gapless analysis (I was thrilled when Apple introduced the feature as I was tired of joining tracks). It's interesting that toggling "Part of a Gapless Album" forces a re-analysis of gapless playback. I've always thought the only way to do this was to remove, then re-add tracks to iTunes. Thanks for the suggestion.

So the Apple techs you spoke to would have us believe that Apple have taken a retrograde step in introducing 3 new model iPods without the ability to playback gapless.

I think those techs are talking out of their rear ends!!

You cannot "fluke" gapless playback on a music player such as an iPod. It requires firmware that supports it.

My iPod Touch also has gapless playback capability.

I'm with Jeff here. Have you tried my suggestion upthread of changing the gapless playback to off, applying, then setting it on again? It's worked for me on a number of occasions, Grateful Dead (#) included, so I know I'm not imagining it.

tt2

# Radio 1/BBC 2 broadcast live from Germany 1981, The Who supporting. What a concert! Sadly before I owned a video...