gapless playback question

If the songs on either side of the gap aren't normally played after each other (i.e. shuffle play and/or in a playlist of mixed songs) then you may hear a transition. Gapless works best when you're playing an album in normal sequence. However, even with non-sequential songs you should not hear a noise, just a sudden transition. Gapless isn't the same as crossfade, if that's what you were expecting.

I believe that iTunes is responsible for pre-calculating the transition between gapless tracks. I have successfully improved things by selecting all tracks of the album and using Get Info., setting Gapless to No, applying, then setting Gapless to Yes and applying again. Obviously if the orignal album included silence between tracks then setting this flag will not help.

tt2

Setting gapless to 'yes' in the tags only prevents Crossfade from working in iTunes. While there might be some strange side effect that you're hearing, the intent of the option is to avoid crossfade for songs tagged as such.

Maybe doing as you say forces a re-scan of the songs and corrects errors made on the first pass, but you ought to end it with the "Part of a gapless album" un-checked if you ever want to use crossfade. If you un-check the option does the "improved" gapless performance remain?

AAC tracks should work fine with gapless. If you're playing live music the transition will be very obvious if you're playing the tracks out of order, but the live tracks I play are seamless when played in order, whether they're mp3 or AAC.

If you converted from lossless to AAC, you may have inadvertently inserted a gap if you burned a CD from lossless and then ripped the CD back as AAC. ( +note that you don't need to burn a CD to create AAC versions of a lossless file+ ) If you burned a CD from the lossless files, check your iTunes burn preferences to see if it is set to insert a 1 or 2 second gap on the CD. If so, I believe that gap will not be removed when you rip the CD back to iTunes.

Setting gapless to 'yes' in the tags only prevents Crossfade from working in iTunes. While there might be some strange side effect that you're hearing, the intent of the option is to avoid crossfade for songs tagged as such.

Indeed - for gapless albums crossfading would spoil the intended effect.

Maybe doing as you say forces a re-scan of the songs and corrects errors made on the first pass, but you ought to end it with the "Part of a gapless album" un-checked if you ever want to use crossfade.

Why would I want to do that? The tracks on such albums are intended to be played seemlessly, not crossfaded one to the other.

If you un-check the option does the "improved" gapless performance remain?

I can't say I've experimented - again I want the gapless effect. But I'll run a test just to see.

tt2

{quote:title=turingtest2 wrote:}
Why would I want to do that? The tracks on such albums are intended to be played seemlessly, not crossfaded one to the other.

I understand what you're saying, but let's say you were using iTunes to play songs out of order (say a playlist and/or just in shuffle mode). If you turn crossfade on then you'll have intermittent results -- the songs tagged as part of a gapless album would not fade in or out, but other songs would. I don't use crossfade, and I presume you don't either. My only point was to highlight the unexpected results you may get with crossfade if you tag songs as part of a gapless album.

My other point was that it really isn't neceesary to do this in order to get the gapless effect -- none of my songs are tagged this way and they play perfectly gapless when played in normal sequence. It sounds like you were having problems and this was a workaround for it, but it really shouldn't be necessary -- hence the question if you un-checked the option would the workaround 'stick'.

So I took one of my gapless albums and unchecked the "part of gapless" flag. then resynched. No noticeable difference on the iPod or in iTunes until I turned on the crossfade feature. I chose an Enigma album, possibly not the best choice since many of the pieces tend to fade through the transisiton, however I was able to spot the join in a way that doesn't normally happen. With this in mind I feel the flag should be set for this album.

If the feature has been sensibly implemented then "part of gapless" should only prevent iTunes trying to crossfade between successive tracks from the same album, while still allowing crossfades in other circumstances.

As to my original post it has worked on a number of occasions (every time) whereas other approaches I've tried, such as resetting the iPod or removing & replacing the tracks on the iPod, have failed. Others have suggested removing from iTunes & reimporting also has the same effect. I originally ripped many of my albums in WMA which supported gapless long before iTunes or WMP got around to figuring how to make it work with MP3's. I'm guessing that most of the problem albums I've had will be ones I had iTunes convert to MP3 as these may have been imported track at a time into iTunes rather than as complete albums which are then checked for gaplessness.

tt2

... I'm not sure I understand, do I need to check part of a gapless album on each track?

Yes, it should work like this...

Select all tracks of the album
Press CTRL-I
Set Gapless to No (tick the adjacent box)
Click OK
Press CTRL-I
Set Gapless to Yes
Click OK
Sync your iPod

tt2

You said there was no problem with FLAC or WAV playback, but it might be worthwhile to double the sector boundaries and make sure there isn't a misalignment. This was more of an issue with SHN, but there is always the chance that this is what's affecting your files. It may not be, but it's worth a shot. Does it happen to ALL files or to a particular show? If it's the latter it could be a sector boundary issue. If it is a sector boundary issue, you can poke around etree.org to find out how to correct the errors.