iTunes 11 - Gapless Albums not working

But why would you want to add an artificial crossfade to a transition that was going to be seamless?

tt2

I too went looking for the "gapless album" tick box and found it was gone, hence looking/finding this thread.

11.0.3 is out today so I went to see if it was back but don't see it.

However, I'm not sure iTunes is to blame. I pulled up my Dark Side of the Moon in iTunes and played as an album and it played perfectly. These are tracks that I added as Apple Lossless imports from the Immersion CD release.

Now the tracks from Phoenix - Bankrupt! (which came from a friend to check out...of questionable origin) were creating a pause between Drakkar Noir and Chloroform and why I went looking for the gapless setting in the first place. So I'm inclined to say it has to do with import settings on tracks and not the way iTunes handles playback.

To test this I purchased the Phoenix album from iTunes and now there is no gap between the two tracks.

Once suggestion I would make short of track replacement, you could figure out which track has the pause (end of one, beginning of next, or both) and adjust the start/stop times in the track settings. iPods will honor those as well.

The "Part of a gapless album" setting is probably the least-understood feature that iTunes ever had. It's purpose was not what many people think, probably because the title of the feature.

"Part of a gapless album" was meant to designate tracks that you don't want crossfaded in case you had crossfade turned on in iTunes. The purpose was such that if you like using crossfade, you could designate certain songs to not fade into each other, and those songs would typically be ones which are meant to with not gap between them (i.e. gapless songs). This feature should have been labeled something like "Don't crossfade this song" and its purpose would have been much more clear. So, Apple quietly removed this feature that was largely misunderstood, and probably not widely used for its intended purpose.

Now some people will say that enabling this setting cured their problem of having gaps between songs that shouldn't have gaps. While that may be true, that would be a side-effect, likely caused by forcing iTunes to re-read these tracks and recognize that they're meant to be gapless.

For albums that should be gapless but are not playing that way, try deleting them from iTunes (but keep the native files of course). Then re-add the files to force iTunes to re-analyze them to see if gapless works.

Gapless playback is a touchy thing, because a lot of the success of it depends on the quality/ settings of the software used to rip from a CD, and mp3s from questionable sources can be of spotty quality. Note that iTunes does not "trim" gaps or do anything to the native file, it scans them upon addition to the library to look for dead space and tries to accommodate the transition through software. It's not perfect and it can only do so much, but sometimes re-adding tracks to force iTunes to try again can help.

rockmyplimsoul wrote:

The purpose was such that if you like using crossfade, you could designate certain songs to not fade into each other, and those songs would typically be ones which are meant to with not gap between them (i.e. gapless songs).

Uggh, it must be Friday ... I intended to write "those songs would typically be ones which are meant to play with no gap between them (i.e. gapless songs)".

I don't. I want my live albums to have seamless transitions.

But it's also convenient, from time to time, to be able to force that semaless transition. I made use of it recently where I wanted to cross fade some tracks but not others when I was using iTunes to play music over a live stage performance.

Is turingtest2 for real, a redundant option has been removed!?! And what's with everyone harping on about the difference in terminolagy between crossfader and gapless. I don't care what you call it, Apple have completely ruined itunes. I dj and have 100's of mixes that have to be gapless to enjoy (or without a crossfade between songs). There's also many many great albums that require to be gapless. I have many that I was due to go back to and make gapless as they never downloaded as that at the time but now I can't. WHY DID THEY REMOVE IT??

Also several albums I've ripped or downloaded from another source have not come through gapless. This is the single most ridiculous update I've known. Add to this list the library search function now that is a joke, making it take ages to create playlists, and the overall functionality of playlists. As someone said in this thread, Apple have designed itunes to now appeal to kids that just buy all their music from itunes and don't really listen to whole albums.

benjspence wrote:

And what's with everyone harping on about the difference in terminolagy between crossfader and gapless.

It is not just different terminology, these are two distinctly different (and separate) features.

• Crossfade is an iTunes setting that creates an overlap between consecutive songs.
• Gapless playback is when there is no additional gap between songs.

By default, all songs play gapless in iTunes unless something is wrong with the native file or with how iTunes read the file when it was added.

Ironically, the "Part of a gapless album" setting was not designed to make songs play gapless, they do that anyway (unless something is wrong). If you read my post above, the "Part of a gapless album" setting was intended to allow you to prevent Crossfade from being applied to songs that you never want crossfaded together -- it has nothing to do with making songs play gaplessly.

The ability to tell iTunes to not Crossfade certain songs is what has been removed, not the ability to play songs with gapless playback. If you're having trouble with gapless playback, remove those songs from iTunes and re-add them. If you still have a problem then it could be due to the encoding of the native file.

Agreed. Apple removing the ability for users to select tracks and deemed them gapless is just BAD. When you create your own playlist and have them in Alpha order or number, the gapless playback is BROKEN. With old iTunes you can set certain tracks gapless, then throw them in any playlist in any order the gapless works great. iTunes 11 removed the functionality because Apple deems that they know better and made the decision for its users. So much for thinking different, this is more like a MIcrosoftian behaviour.

Please read my posts above, the "Part of a gapless album" setting had nothing to do with making songs play gaplessly. The only thing Apple has removed is your ability to prevent certain songs from crossfading into each other, in case you had Crossfade turned on.

Throw those tracks in a custom playlist and sort them by Alpha or number. Your Gapless tracks are now broken.

No, the answer your giving is just Apple apologist MO. Gapless Setting has everything to do to make songs deemed by its users to play gaplessly by choice. Since live tracks and some CD tracks that you want in a customer playlist to remail gapless.

SuperSizeIt wrote:

No, the answer your giving is just Apple apologist MO.

What's with the attitude? I'm relaying the explanation on this feature as given by Apple themselves:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1797

If that is "apologist MO" then I guess you know better than Apple as to what the intent of this setting was.😝

What you may have experienced is what I alluded to above -- by changing your tags to designate this feature, you forced iTunes to re-read them. You can get this same effect by deleting and re-adding the songs to iTunes in case there was a problem with how iTunes read the files. If that doesn't work, then perhaps something is wrong with your files.

Gapless playback is alive and well in iTunes 11 for me, but you seem to be under the impression that gapless playback should work in a playlist of mixed songs. That is not the case, and never has been. Gapless playback is only for back-to-back songs from the same album (think Dark Side of the Moon), it has never worked in shuffle mode nor in cases where the songs are not originally meant to play sequentially.

No attitude, I've been here since 92 to see enough answers as simply dismissed as a "removed feature for your own good" for years. Sorry I came up a bit crass there. ;-)

There is no way to apply User Custom Gapless to individual tracks onces its added in iTunes. If you have the CD, lucky for me I stil have them, you can set it before importing to iTunes. If you recorded live tracks or downloaded iTunes Purchases, there is currently no way to manually set gapless for particular tracks that you want to throw into a custom play list. Your only option is to:

Burn the iTunes purchased songs on a CD. Then import the CD back after you deemed which tracks you want as Gapless. Now you can throw these in any customer playlist in any order and the merge track will be there.

But there never has been a way to specify a "User Custom Gapless" setting for a track. The "Part of a gapless album" was not it if that's what you're thinking.

There is an iTunes a setting for when you burn a CD you could designate a gap of 0 to 5 seconds, but not for ripping a CD and certainly not for designating iTunes purchases to play gaplessly.

As I said, all songs that should play gapless will play gapless. The only exceptions are:

• Shuffle mode is on
• You are playing songs that aren't back-to-back tracks from the same album
• There is a hard-coded gap built into the native file
• There is an error in the encoding, or in how iTunes read the file when it was added

If any of those apply to your situation, gapless playback won't happen (and never did).

Yes there was. Previous versions allows you to throw in tracks and enable them as Gapless. Thus Customer User Gapless tracks.. You can do this without having to re-rip a CD.