Burn CD: What does "automatic" mean for Gap Between Songs settings?

Bump.

Why is there still no answer for this??

It doesn't seem to be documented anywhere 😟. If I was to guess I'd say that "automatic" defaults to a 2-second gap, unless the tracks satisfy the same criteria that apply to cross fading, i.e., have been tagged as part of a gapless album and are consecutive with respect to the original. Why don't you test and see what the results are?

Thank you. I'll have to experiment when I can. I was burning a mixed CD and wanted to get the best settings. For today I used crossfade 1 second and chose "none" for gap between songs.

The cross fade function only works for playback within iTunes - it doesn't have any effect on songs that you burn to CD.

hhgttg27 wrote:

It doesn't seem to be documented anywhere 😟. If I was to guess I'd say that "automatic" defaults to a 2-second gap, unless the tracks satisfy the same criteria that apply to cross fading, i.e., have been tagged as part of a gapless album and are consecutive with respect to the original. Why don't you test and see what the results are?

I have done some tests, and it I believe your guess is correct - "automatic" seems to default to a 2-second gap (no idea, however, regarding cross fading).

The crossfade setting only applies during playback in iTunes, and then when tracks within a playlist are not from the same album and in consecutive order. iTunes used to have a user-controllable setting called "gapless playback" which worked in conjunction with cross fading, so that even if you had enabled the latter playing tracks in sequence from one "gapless" album the crossfades wouldn't apply - the classic examples being albums like Dark Side of the Moon where the tracks are intended to flow into each other and cross-fading would be inappropriate. The ability to set or unset "gapless playback" disappeared from iTunes several releases ago and, as far as I can tell, all albums are now tagged as gapless - so the crossfade rule is now simply applied between tracks from different albums, or non-consecutive tracks from one album.

As far as the "automatic" setting for CD burning is concerned, I was simply guessing that this might apply a similar rule to crossfading - i.e., it would insert a 2 second gap except in the case of tracks from one album that are being burned in track sequence. I may, though, be entirely wrong in this assumption 😉 and "automatic" is simply the same as setting the gap to 2 seconds.

Just did a test to see what "Automatic" does. So far as I can tell, it reproduces the tracks with the exact track-gap they have in the playlist. In this specific case, the CD I was burning had four tracks, with 2" gaps between 1&2, 2&3, and 3&4 and no gap between 3&4. That's how the burned CD was. Then I re-burned the playlist with a 5"-gap setting. Guess what? Each track is exactly 5" longer.

So there's the answer. "Automatic" burns your playlist exactly as it is. Selecting "X seconds" as the gap between songs adds X seconds of silence between each track.

If you have sound files that have no silence at the end and you do not have a gap then the songs will be strung together on a CD. I believe the norm is to have a 2 second gap but if you are using your CD for, say, a dance class where you want to have time to pause before the next track you might want longer. If the sound files already have a lot of silence at the end you may want shorter.