Gapless Music Playback Issue

The gapless playback issue was killing me when listening to DJ mixes and gapless albums!

I'm enrolled in the public beta software program and the issue is addressed in iOS13.2 which was released today. I am aware that iOS beta may have bugs in it, but its a chance I decided to take back when iOS 13 beta first came out. Luckily, it's been pretty stable on my iPhone X. Then again, every user may experience something different.

If you decide to go the iOS beta route, here is the link to enroll: https://beta.apple.com.

A friend of mine rips CD's of EDM for her dance workshops (stepping), and she called out for help on this issue. She was running iPadOS 13.1.3 on her iPad having the issue. After reading the input from this topic here I advised her to update to iPadOS 13.2.3, and she's just reported the issues are over! The music plays without gaps again. Hope this solves it for other users as well.

Updating to 13.2 has fixed the problem for me with ripped music on my iPhone Xs. Sorry to hear it didn't fix it for some.

While we wait for Apple to fix this issue for mp3s, I converted some of my albums to AAC files and gapless playback does work with those. This is just a temporary fix as I don't want to convert the thousands of songs in my library to AAC - I use mp3s for other programs. Apple really needs to fix this bug so I can continue to rip CDs as mp3s.

Hey everyone,

I installed the beta of 13.2 on my iPad Air 2. I tried two different live albums with it and both played back without gaps (like the way they always have) and I tried the same albums on my iPhone XS running 13.1.2 and the gaps were present on the exact same albums. I manually synced these albums to both devices via iTunes and both are MP3.

I found a temporary solution to my gapless music playback issue. There is a music player called VOX in the App Store that can access your iTunes music library (if you allow it to) and you can play music there “gaplessly” from there! It is a beautiful app and it’s free and it has worked flawlessly for me so far.

I tried the free version of VOX which, with one exception that I may know the cause of, seems to work perfectly so far as a workaround. So at least it's not necessarily the IOS, just bad or compromised Music app coding on top of it. Maybe it's to try and push people to swap out their ripped CDs fo the Apple Music equivalents and so become more dependent on it? Will try to write up a feedback template later today, once I have got a few things out of the way. All my ripped music is ALAC, with the bulk of it manually synced (and therefor converted on the fly by iTunes to AAC during thr transfer to the iPhone. LOnly the most recent stuff is Ripped to ALAC on my Mac and then getting to the iPhone via iCloud. So I suspect a lot of those tracks are matched ones, rather than from the source files.

I can confirm that this problem has been resolved in 13.2 for me.

iOS 13.2 fixed the issue for me

Thank you, I was wondering if a third party app could fix it in the meantime and VOX works just fine!

I would also like to add my frustration to this issue and hopefully prompt Apple to realise that there is indeed a problem and fix in the next update.

i also noticed this ‘micro-gap’ between songs that should be continuous music: eg, a continuous concert recording that is split over several tracks.

My CD library was imported into iTunes in MP3 and recently this micro-gap has appeared, when for years I had no issue at all when played on my iPad, iPhone and Mac.

I called Apple and was on the phone for what must of been an hour and the agent was able to hear my issue and said he would escalate. A few days later he returned a call and according to Apple this was within it’s parameters and there were too many variables to decipher what is causing this issue (in this sentiment anyway). There was nothing that they were able to do.

i even tried playing an album streamed from Apple Music and it does exactly the same.....

Called into an Apple store and explained the same and he said ‘that must be so annoying’. Well it is...

Please Apple, sort this issue out, it does exist by way of the comments here....why mess with something that worked perfectly well for so many years.... It’s now become a deal breaker for me... Unless this is sorted, when time comes to change my equipment Apple will no longer be my obvious choice...

the gap happens only with uploaded material. Works smoothly with Apple Music tracks. in Catalina the playback is gapless both with apple music and with uploaded tracks