iTunes 11 - Gapless Albums not working

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree ... I've been an avid iTunes user for the last 8 years and have never seen such a setting. The only setting that I've seen is "Part of a gapless album" but that had nothing to do with making an album play without gaps between songs.

Well maybe your right, its been so long since I forced gapless tracks on certain Queen CD thats I have... I'm trying to remember if I did them before ripping or afterwards.... back in 2006-7 I think... getting old. LOL

Entirely possible, this getting old stuff really stinks ;-)

a now redundant (and confusing) option has been removed...

Most of what needs to be said has been covered by rockmyplimsoul. I'm suggesting that given the feature didn't do what most people thought it did, and iTunes will now always attempt to treat consecutive tracks from the same album as gapless (i.e. not crossfade them, which is what I assume is going on) then the option is no longer needed. I haven't conducted exhaustive tests, but where I've checked my gapless albums still play gaplessly.

I can't help with the lack of coverflow or multiple windows, but many other changes in the new iTunes are reversible. See this post. Changing the sidebar & search options might make things a little easier when creating playlists. While I agree that removing long established features, necessitating a change in workflow, is annoying I find it more productive to focus on working with (and occasionally around) what is, than to wish for what was or what could be.

There is also iTunes Feedback if you'd like to try get your thoughts through to those in charge...

tt2

rockmyplimsoul what the... so you are apple I take it. Gapless album option made my albums gapless. I have some albums that havent come across gapless and they have small pauses in between. I download allbums from all manor of websites, all legal. But sometimes things don't download gaplessly and have small gaps between songs. I now cant get rid of those gaps. Please explain what I am to do. Because all I'm hearing is a load of nonsense. And yes there was always an option to make things gapless, either pre, or post ripping.

As SuperSizeIt said, you could make parts of albums or playlists gapless, eg I would have a ministry of sound compilation with 3 cds and put them into one playlist. I'd then sometimes have to make first 10 tracks (cd 1) gapless, then next 10 and so on. Now I can't. I just don't understand how you and turingtest2 can argue this.

benjspence wrote:

And yes there was always an option to make things gapless, either pre, or post ripping.

Did you happen to read my post where Apple themselves explains this feature? It is quite clear what the intended purpose of this feature was:

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

benjspence wrote:

rockmyplimsoul what the... so you are apple I take it.

Maybe I should ask that of you, since you seem to know better than the Apple article above.

benjspence wrote:

I'd then sometimes have to make first 10 tracks (cd 1) gapless, then next 10 and so on. Now I can't. I just don't understand how you and turingtest2 can argue this.

By enabling this "Part of a gapless album" option, a side-effect is that iTunes will re-read these tracks for gapless transitions, and if they weren't coded properly the first time around, then enabling this feature happened to correct the problem. As I said above, you can get the same effect by deleting the tracks and re-adding them to iTunes (as long as there isn't something inherently wrong with the native files -- iTunes can't and won't trim dead space which may be part of the original encoding).

Whoah I found the old way of doing it. Yes with current iTunes automatic gapless works. No need to select tracks and make them gapless, but lets say 3 songs from the album are meant to play continiously like these tracks in my Queen II album, "Procession - Father To Son - White Queen (As It Began)".

Once you hit shuffle, the three tracks imported on the CD are no longer played in sequential order. The only way is if you "combine" the 3 tracks into 1 during import of a CD. If you did that your imported CD will be numbered "Track 1 Procession - Father To Son - White Queen (As It Began)" followed by "Track 4". The individual tracks are no longer shown and you can't play them individually anymore. It's all merged together during import as long as you have the CD. Throw track 1 in any playlist and all three songs will play in sequence because in reality its merged as a single file now.

If you bought it at the iTunes store, playing the album in Shuffle breaks them apart and no longer play the 3 songs continiously. All tracks are shuffled around. Sure it plays gapless, but thats kinda silly if the 3 tracks within the album are meant to play continiously...1,2,3, and shuffle ruins the sequence.

Now here is the cool part from previous itunes.

Previous iTunes you can do this:

http://osxdaily.com/2012/04/30/join-songs-in-itunes-to-play-together-as-a-group- when-shuffled/

The question at this stage is has Apple responded to this yet?

Apple tend not to comment.

tt2

tosborne wrote:

The question at this stage is has Apple responded to this yet?

No, and you won't see them respond to this for two reasons: this is a user-to-user forum and they typically don't participate, and what you're seeing is by-design if you understand the true purpose of the "Part of a gapless album" setting that was removed.

After fidgiting with iTunes and reading the online help, here is how you join tracks or keep tracks selected to play in order from your custom playlist. Even if you have it in Shuffle mode on your playlist.

"From iTunes Help:

Shuffle or repeat songs

Do any of the following:

Turn shuffle on or off: Click the Shuffle button

Shuffle is on when the arrows are blue

Shuffle albums or groupings: Choose Controls > Turn On Shuffle > “by Albums” (or “by Groupings”). iTunes plays the songs in the order in which they appear on the album or in the grouping, and then chooses another album or grouping at random."

All you do is make sure you give that grouping a custom name for that group.

SuperSizeIt wrote:

After fidgiting with iTunes and reading the online help, here is how you join tracks or keep tracks selected to play in order from your custom playlist. Even if you have it in Shuffle mode on your playlist.

Back-to-back ordering of certain tracks while in shuffle mode likely exists as its own topic somewhere on this site, but it really doesn't have anything to do with this thread (i.e. gapless playback not working for some people, and the [unrelated] removal of the iTunes setting that governed Crossfade). But shuffle by grouping is a really neat trick and is often overlooked.

By enabling this "Part of a gapless album" option, a side-effect is that iTunes will re-read these tracks for gapless transitions, and if they weren't coded properly the first time around, then enabling this feature happened to correct the problem. As I said above, you can get the same effect by deleting the tracks and re-adding them to iTunes (as long as there isn't something inherently wrong with the native files -- iTunes can't and won't trim dead space which may be part of the original encoding).

I'm surprised that this side-effect doesn't get mentioned more often in discussions involving the disappearance of the gapless check box. This is the first time I've seen any mention of this side-effect. I skimmed back through the thread and saw that you alluded to it earlier, but I missed it that first time.

Generally these discussions have, on one side, people relating their past experiences that tracks that played with a gap stopped playing with a gap once the gapless checkbox was ticked, and on the other side one or two people saying how this is impossible, the gapless check box never governed gapless playback, was only for crossfade, FOR GOD'S SAKE YOU DON'T NEED THE GAPLESS CHECKBOX, etc.

It's no wonder that people think checking the gapless box does something to fix their problem - as you say, it can. It just doesn't fix the problem the way most people think it does. If I understand you correctly, it's not the box being checked that fixes the gaps, it's the fact that the file got rescanned when the box was checked. Once the file is rescanned and fixed, the state of the box doesn't matter any longer with respect to gaps.

So it's understandable that people want the gapless checkbox back - there needs to be a way to fix problems without deleting tracks and adding them back in. Who would think of doing that, and why would they think it would help if it didn't work correctly the first time? On the other hand, many people would poke around in the track info and see a box having to do with gapless playback. >CLICK< Hooray! No more gaps.

One thing I've never seen discussed with respect to the gapless box is Sound Check. How does iTunes know not to have a different iTunNORM value for e.g. the 3rd and 4th movements of Beethoven's 5th Symphony? Presumably the same as with the gaps.

I realize that the gapless stuff is supposed to be automatic and you should never need to mess with it, but Douglas Adams had a great bit on that: "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." 🙂

Yes I believe you understand what I'm trying to get across. If people can temporarily ignore past experiences and just look at the fundamentals they might understand better:

1- Once gapless playback became supported by iTunes years ago, it would always be used and thus no need to designate tracks to play gaplessly. All consecutive album tracks play gapless, unless there's something wrong with them or in how iTunes calculated the transition.

2- Gapless playback has never worked in shuffle mode, nor anywhere that two consecutive tracks don't normally play back-to-back (e.g. a playlist of various tracks).

3- Prior to iTunes 11, crossfade used to work between any tracks, even when playing an album in normal track sequence. For certain albums where you didn't want this to happen you would use the "Part of a gapless album" to prevent crossfading between these tracks (this is explained in the Apple article I referenced).

4- With iTunes 11, Apple made it such that crossfade no longer works between consecutive tracks, so the "Part of a gapless album" setting was no longer needed (thus the "redundant" comment by turingtest2 above).

My frustration is that prior to iTunes 11, ALL of my designated gapless albums played back gaplessly. Now, with iTunes 11, none of them do, no matter how I try to adjust the various settings. (I have not tried the delete and reload option that has been mentioned.)

This is very irritating and something Apple can and should fix. It should not be incumbent on the consumer or require a tedious work around (such as the delete and reload suggestion).