seemless track transitions. So when you listen to an album that blends the tracks together, there's no annoying hiccup when the mp3s switch. Why is crossfade playback included in iTunes but not on iPod? Lame. Crossfade would help but surely there has to be a way to make the tracks end and start at the same time. As many revisions of the iPod as there has been, how has this not been addressed?
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iPod one thing the ipod is lacking BADLY
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Wasn't this originally because of the use of a HDD? Maybe it's more doable in the Nano or Shuffle, but I don't think it's simple to implement in the regular iPod. Maybe by preloading the next song, although that only works if the user doesn't select songs himself
altogether said:
This drives me CRAZY as well... whats even more frustrating is that if im listining to an album on iTunes i get gapless playback... just not on the iPod itself... COME ON APPLE!
It's perfectly possible on the HDD based iPod. An iPod doesn't read from it's hard disk all the time, it only accesses it very rarely. If you choose an album with 14 songs in it, it can load all of those songs into it's buffer, meaning the hard drive doesn't have to be accessed at all...
I agree, COME ON APPLE!!!
Listening to Boards of Canada is very difficult with the iPod behaving the way it does...
I agree, COME ON APPLE!!!
Listening to Boards of Canada is very difficult with the iPod behaving the way it does...
Macnoviz said:
Exhibit A: Rio Karma plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC gapless. It also plays LAME encoded mp3 gapless by using the track length tag embedded in the file. For other mp3 files, it checks and compenstates for the frame-gap issue inherent in mp3. In my experience the mp3 compensation is not quite perfect, but Vorbis and FLAC gapless are handled beautifully.
Exhibit B: Rockbox firmware, including the iPod port, has gapless playback. So we know it has nothing to do with hardware limitations.
/end-dead-horse-beating
Electro Funk said:This drives me CRAZY as well... whats even more frustrating is that if im listining to an album on iTunes i get gapless playback... just not on the iPod itself... COME ON APPLE!
How do you enable gapless playback in iTunes? I still hear a gap.
Loge said:
you cant exactly do gapless, but you can set a crossfade playback where the next song kinda starts a few seconds over the currently playing song
altogether said:
There might be some confusion here. On most CDs, the songs are separated by a couple seconds of silence. That "gap" is not what the OP was referring to.
On some CDs, the audio plays continuously, even as the track numbers change (like applause on live concert recordings, DJ Mix CDs, or bands like Tool, who combine two or more tracks into one). If you rip the individual tracks from one of these CDs into iTunes, you hear the continuous audio. If you listen to the tracks on your iPod, there is a silent "gap" that occurs between the tracks. I agree that this need to be fixed asap. It can really ruin the listening experience.
I would love to have crossfade on the iPod, too.
Yes, I would like gapless playback also.
I bought an album off of iTunes that was meant to be played as one large song, but while on the iPod, it sounds terrible.
I bought an album off of iTunes that was meant to be played as one large song, but while on the iPod, it sounds terrible.
Flowbee said:
The gap occurs in iTunes as well. As the previous poster indicated, use of crossfade can improve the situation but this is not "exact". The only way to eliminate the gap in my experience is to join tracks, which is fine for opera, for example, where you don't need the split tracks, but not ideal overall.
Loge said:
I'll be damned. It's been so long since I've listened to music from iTunes that I forgot it had this problem too.
My bad.
Loge said:
u sure about that??? my iTunes library is filled with electronic music, my own and other dj friends... i could swear when im listining from the iMac over airtunes (airport express connected to stereo) that i dont get the milisecond gap... i will have to go check it out...
Edit: i just checked it out... i have crossfade playback unchecked... when i play a continuous cd in iTunes that is tracked out, i get no gap at all... there is a seamless transition through each song... no gap at all...
did you play the CD or imported songs in iTunes? I just checked as well with the soundtrack from gladiator and it has a gap with crossfade and all the bells and whistles turned off (sound check and such)Electro Funk said:
This is something that really annoys me. Why can' they get rid of the gap? They have been creating itunes for years and they still can't fix it?
For Windows folks, Foobar2000 support gapless playback. I just sampled FLAC, OGG, MP3 and WMA. The first 3 were handled perfectly. The WMA sample had a slight but noticable click.
Sample tracks that I used:
FLAC - Green Day, Dookie, "Chump" -> "Longview"
OGG - Green Day, Dookie, "Chump" -> "Longview"
MP3 - INXS, Kick, "Need You Tonight" -> "Mediate"
WMA - Eminem, The Eminem Show, "The Kiss" -> "Soldier"
I don't have any AAC or ALAC files, so I can't comment there, but the perfect mp3 test is promising.
Sample tracks that I used:
FLAC - Green Day, Dookie, "Chump" -> "Longview"
OGG - Green Day, Dookie, "Chump" -> "Longview"
MP3 - INXS, Kick, "Need You Tonight" -> "Mediate"
WMA - Eminem, The Eminem Show, "The Kiss" -> "Soldier"
I don't have any AAC or ALAC files, so I can't comment there, but the perfect mp3 test is promising.
Hehe
"Exhibit A: Rio Karma plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC gapless."
Reading the above line at 1:25am while sick (actually sick, not drunk) is really, really amusing...
"Exhibit A: Rio Karma plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC gapless."
Reading the above line at 1:25am while sick (actually sick, not drunk) is really, really amusing...
It's possible if not every CD you have requires gapless, because that would take far too long. See the conversion process below. To me the occasional gap I do notice (and it is truly occasional, since I listen to many music types) is not really an issue.
http://gapless.itunes.wanderingfocus.com/
AAC's/ALACs and some types of MP3 are gapless in iTunes. Regular MP3 isn't.
The Karma may be gapless but it has certain problems filling its (less than half the size of the iPods) buffer. The Sony HD/A walkmen are only gapless with the proprietary ATRAC codec. While owners of those machines may like to crow about it over the iPod I find life is no better on the other side, just a diffferent set of compromises.
http://gapless.itunes.wanderingfocus.com/
AAC's/ALACs and some types of MP3 are gapless in iTunes. Regular MP3 isn't.
The Karma may be gapless but it has certain problems filling its (less than half the size of the iPods) buffer. The Sony HD/A walkmen are only gapless with the proprietary ATRAC codec. While owners of those machines may like to crow about it over the iPod I find life is no better on the other side, just a diffferent set of compromises.
Actually that doesn't bother me so much, two things which do irrotate me are you cannot add to an On-the-Go playlist from within the song ie. if you were on shuffle and came across a song youw wanted to add it to the playlist - you can't.
Also, The ability to flick into all songs from an album would be great, I'm often listening on shuffle and a song comes up and I think 'Ill listen to the whole album actually' wish there was a quick way of switching, without having to go through the entire menu system.
Also, The ability to flick into all songs from an album would be great, I'm often listening on shuffle and a song comes up and I think 'Ill listen to the whole album actually' wish there was a quick way of switching, without having to go through the entire menu system.
Airtunes doesn't have a gap when playing, because it is constantly buffering the audio. Turn off all cross fading in itunes and play out to airport express! Bliss
If you have quicktime pro, you can copy and paste all the tracks back to back and save them back together as one big audio file. I have tried this with lossless files and it works.
there is also that way of adding chapter points to a single-track cd, so that you can have gapless playback on your iPod and still change tracks, but it only works with AAC files and not lossless, so its not much use to me. http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/faq.html scroll down to chapter tool download link
I agree with the thread completely! The day apple bring out a software update (unlikely) or new iPod (more likely) that can do gapless playback is the day I go to the apple store and buy my first Hard Disk MP3 player
If you have quicktime pro, you can copy and paste all the tracks back to back and save them back together as one big audio file. I have tried this with lossless files and it works.
there is also that way of adding chapter points to a single-track cd, so that you can have gapless playback on your iPod and still change tracks, but it only works with AAC files and not lossless, so its not much use to me. http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/faq.html scroll down to chapter tool download link
I agree with the thread completely! The day apple bring out a software update (unlikely) or new iPod (more likely) that can do gapless playback is the day I go to the apple store and buy my first Hard Disk MP3 player
This has been the most requested new feature since the birth of the first iPod. Other manufacturers have overcome the mp3 gap problem. Some software people have even managed it using iPod hardware The only reasonable explanation is that Apple does not think the problem is serious enough to warrant a solution, which is a shame because the click or gap is so un-Apple like.
The only reasonable explanation is that Apple does not think the problem is serious enough to warrant a solution, which is a shame because the click or gap is so un-Apple like.
Sesshi said:
Seems like an awful lot of work to hear gapless.
Sesshi said:
True, as good as FLAC sounds, FFW and RW within a track with the Karma's 16 MB buffer is not so good. With Ogg Vorbis, the only limitation is that if I decide to append any tracks to my running playlist while listening to the front end track of a gapless transition, then I will get a gap. Kinda sucks, but it's a very small price to pay in my book. Other than that one small limitation, I have no such problems at all.
And I'll leave it at that. I don't want to turn this into a "my dap is better than your dap". My whole point in the thread is that there is no reason why the iPod shouldn't do the same thing out of the box with stock firmware.
EvilBeans said:
Isn't that what you basically saying with almost every post in this iPod discussion subforum on a Mac forum?
simonthewolf said:
I guess the inclusion of gapless in the next iPod will depend on how many of the gazillions of iPod owners out there complain about it. I get the feeling that even when you see frequent complaints on forums, it's not actually that big a contingent when counted as a percentage of iPod owners. From what I can make out a good deal of the feedback for the iPod comes from music makers but even that could go two ways: If there are a lot of DJ's in the feedback group you'll get a lot of requests for gapless. If they're 'song 1, song 2, song 3' type of artists they may not even have noticed the iPod isn't gapless. e.g. A couple of my friends only realised it when I mentioned it.