iTunes 11 - Gapless Albums not working

Or perhaps Apple should just restore Gapless playback until they can figure out a way to flawlessly handle gapless albums.

The problem is the "new improved iTunes" has been designed

by young kids that have been brought up in and live in a

"sound byte" world. They don't have the attention span to

listen to a musical work with many songs leading onto another.

Too busy texting between and during music playback!

I have just listened to "Dark Side of The Moon" by Pink Floyd using the "Albums" tab, and then again from the "Artists", "Genres" and "Songs" tabs. This album plays as a gapless album. This particular album plays gaplessly, however some other gapless albums in my collection don't.

It should be a simple thing to to . . .

• Put a checkbox into the Information Window for a track that says "Part of a Gapless Album"
• If the current and following track both have this checkbox set - don't put a gap between the tracks, and don't crossfade them either

That makes it very simple and intuitive, doesn't it. Does anybody agree? If you choose to put the tracks in a playlist out of order, and then play them - then you will get something possibly a little wrong. So be carefull to select all the tracks or the sequence of tracks you would like and drag them into the playlist so they are in order.

Does this make sense?

Of course! It makes perfect sense. It is in fact the solution that was available for years before iTunes 11 came along.

To its credit, in my experience so far, iTunes 11 has little difficulty playing gapless albums that were purchased through the iTunes Store. Unfortunately, the ones it does not seem to be able to handle are the ones I ripped from CD's, which have been in my Library for years. Long ago I made the change you described to the songs that need to be played as part of a gapless album, and I haven't thought about the overall listening experience since then - I've just listened to my music.

The clear solution now, not surprisingly, is to subscribe to iTunes Match. It's no different than changing a perfectly good plug or something in order to force someone to buy an adapter. I think it's sad that Apple does this type of thing.

Very disappointing thing. Gapless albums are one of the most important things in my library, so please repair this thing Apple!!

Just noticed this today, a fair amount of my music is mixed and now if the albums are separated into tracks, there is a pause in between. Really *****, sort it out asap : /

Sidenote: why the f**k doesn't spell checking work in these forums?

Just checked a few more of my old FabricLive mixed albums – some work gaplessly, some don't. There is no indication why, they all have exactly the same credentials/settings.

Clearly, the option to 'reanalyse' or explicitly assign as 'gapless' is what is required here. It seems much of the gapless information has been lost from my library when upgrading to the new iTunes.

😟

Removing the gapless album feature ranks as one of the DUMBEST MOVES APPLE HAS EVER DONE!!

designaholic wrote:

Sidenote: why the f**k doesn't spell checking work in these forums?

Spell checking is typically a function of your browser. But the forum itself has its own spell check function. You have to hit it manually, perhaps it overrides the browser.

I can no longer find the option to designate someting as Gapless, but I recently ripped a new live CD into iTunes and it appears to not have gaps between tracks. Perhaps it's getting that information when it downloads the information about the album from the Internet. I also imported these as MP3 and not ACC and I wonder if that makes a difference.

I just got off the phone with Apple support....

They have eliminated gapless playback of albums, so now EVERY song on a mixed DJ set or Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (or millions of other albums) - each track will have a 1 second gap between them. COmpletely ruining the way the album was meant to be listened to.

They reverse-engineered and went back to crappy playback like Android and Windows OS phones USED to do. Doesn't make much sense does it?

I repaeat - do NOT upgrade to iTunes 11, you will be severely disappointed.

For those that have already upgraded and lost gapless playback, submit a Feedback request and demand for gapless playback to be brought back into iTunes ASAP!!! FIll out the form here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

I gave feedback, but I also have to say that I haven't really noticed a problem with live albums. I think they only took away the ability to select whether or not an album is gapless, not whether or not it is. IE: If you download a live album from the iTunes store, it may play gapless. I might be wrong.

The problem does come with they've miscategorized something as not being gapless when it should be and we can't change it. I hope they add this flag back.

Are you also saying Google's Play Music doesn't do gapless? It lacks a lot of features that iTunes has, I use it on my phone and I'm nearly always playing random tracks. I'll submit some feedback to Google to see if we can get an enhancement in there. Remember that Play is much younger than iTunes. Much like Apple Maps was an utter failure when compared to Google Maps.

I'm listening to a gapless album now, playing gaplessly. I believe a redundant option has simply been removed. iTunes assumes two consecutive tracks are meant to play seamlessly and will attempt to do just that (despite the shortcomings of mp3 in regard to gapless support). Marking something as gapless wasn't ever able to remove gaps that existed on the source disc.

tt2

Have you tried selecting all the tracks on the album prior to import and then clicking on "Join CD tracks" under the options menu. This article explains more

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/join-cd-tracks-option-not-app earing-in-itunes-11/

I believe the difference hits when you have iTunes configured to cross fade songs. It will not cross fade songs from a gapless album.