iOS 16.2 Gapless Playback

I had this issue before back on iOS 15 and had a phone call with the Apple Support. He told me to disable Dolby Atmos in Settings>Music>Audio because with Bluetooth the Apple Music App tries to check Dolby Atmos support for every title played. Since my bluetoth devices do not support Dolby Atmos, I’ve disabled it. The gaps have been better after that, and they were gone completely after the next iOS update.

So now with iOS 16.3 they are gone again, and I keep Dolby Atmos disabled 😉 I have no gaps anymore since updating to iOS 16.3 yesterday.

Maybe you could give it a try.

It's a big problem when I use my iPhone and iPad for LesMills class. But I found a possible solution. You can try to remove the MUSIC app (like totally delete it), reinstall it from App Store, and then re-import songs. Gapless is back!

I've tried this solution on my iPhone 11 Pro and iPad 6th Gen.

iOS 16.3 has been released and the problem seems to be gone again.

I‘ve updated from 16.2 with the gapless playback issue to 16.3 on my iPhone 13 Mini. I hope Apple will keep this fix in mind for future updates…

I upgraded to iOS 16.3 yesterday and I can confirm that it seems fixed now when I use my EarPods (via Lightning).

I haven’t tried any Bluetooth device yet (e.g. my FreeBuds 4i which I was already using with my old phone) but I’m confident. 😁

I’ll try disabling Dolby Atmos if needed, thanks for the suggestion.

I just did what another user suggested and downloaded Foobar2000. It's working perfectly for me right now. Nice to not hear gaps in DJ Mixes.

I just installed the iOS 16.3.1 update on my iPhone 12 mini . . . and gapless playback is working again.

I had this issue in 16.2. This resolved itself when I upgraded to 16.3. Lesson learned: not all bug fixes - like this one - appear in the release notes.

I had this same problem

I fixed it by shutting off BLUETOOTH

Yes, disabling Dolby Atmos helps. However, a _smart_ software engineer would have the program check for this _before_ the next track starts playing. Don’t tell me it can’t be done.

I have had a tough day with this issue. I purchased a concert recording by one of my favorite artists and I thought there was a corrupt download as this issue was fixed after iOS 15.4...I had to buy the download again and I wasted money and time on this, today on Christmas. I am on an iPhone 12 Max.

As a fix, I am using Foobar 2000 and the playback of gapless recordings is flawless...it just has a wonky looking interface.

This is by no means a solution, but a workaround I found rather effective for me: considering that you're not very likely to switch between tracks while the fitness class is in progress (otherwise you wouldn't need gapless playback), would importing a full-length mix as a single file instead of importing it "split" into tracks work for you?

I'm doing this for training mixes right now and, although not being optimal, it works.

Instead of ripping a CD with iTunes and then syncing it to the iPhone, I'm just ripping it with CDex (I use a very old version for that, I wouldn't advise anyone to use any of the recent ones), then adding the mp3 file to the iTunes library, and copying it manually onto the iPhone.

Still I'm hoping Apple get their stuff together and solve this issue (hopefully forever this time), but at least I have a workaround to exploit now.

Firsts, tanks for notify that 16.5 was available.

second, I let you know that there’s nothing more important on iPad for me that there’s no gaps on music app between songs. 16.5 It works perfectly for me.

Foobar 2000 just saved my life! I work with dance classes and gapless playback is vital to keep my members dancing on the beat!

Until Apple gets its **** together, Foobar 2000 it is!

iOS 16.3 RC can fix the problem on my iPhone 11 Pro.

As the original poster mentioned, this is getting so old. This year the issue popped up in April then it was fixed with an update. Now in December the issue has popped up again. I am getting extremely frustrated with Apple and their developers. Pretty poor development and release cycles where a bug keeps getting introduced again. Poor QA and poor development procedures. Seems like developers cannot merge code correctly if they keep introducing a bug that was supposedly fixed. I'm talking from experience since I'm a senior software engineer with decades of experience. Usually when bugs keep coming back its because the developer had a merge conflict and was lazy and just fixed it with taking their version, while reverting code that was correct. Can Apple start looking at their software release process and stop bringing back old bugs?