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iTunes 5 - Gapless CDs?!!

JackRipper

JackRipper

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 14, 2002
182
12
South Carolina
Anyone else notice this??

I bought Gorillaz - Demon Days this weekend, encoded AAC 320 Kbps, and burned a copy for my car.

I listened to said CD on my way into work this morning and was pleasantly surprised to hear there is no gap between the few songs that lead into eachother!!!!

When playing through iTunes I still hear gaps, sadly, but gapless CDs are a great start!! I always wondered why the gaps were there in the first place. I know it's got something to do with the files themselves, but if you know an AAC is always going to have a split second of silence in the begining and/or the end why not skip burning that part?

I guess they figured that out! YAY!
 
JackRipper said:
Anyone else notice this??

I bought Gorillaz - Demon Days this weekend, encoded AAC 320 Kbps, and burned a copy for my car.

I listened to said CD on my way into work this morning and was pleasantly surprised to hear there is no gap between the few songs that lead into eachother!!!!

When playing through iTunes I still hear gaps, sadly, but gapless CDs are a great start!! I always wondered why the gaps were there in the first place. I know it's got something to do with the files themselves, but if you know an AAC is always going to have a split second of silence in the begining and/or the end why not skip burning that part?

I guess they figured that out! YAY!
Click to expand...
If you rip the CD as Apple Lossless, are there gaps in iTunes?
 
JackRipper said:
Not sure, I only do 320 to save space as I have a lot of songs.
Click to expand...

I just realized I could conduct the experiment myself. I ripped the Beatles' Abbey Road just now and tested it. Unfortunately, no gapless playback, even with Apple Lossless. It does, however, play gapless when you play straight from the CD.
 
I thought that you could alwasy burn gapless CDs, afterall you are converting it to a wav format and then dumping it to the disc. The trouble was playback from the AAC file in iTunes or on the iPod gapless-ly.
 
mrgreen4242 said:
I thought that you could alwasy burn gapless CDs, afterall you are converting it to a wav format and then dumping it to the disc. The trouble was playback from the AAC file in iTunes or on the iPod gapless-ly.
Click to expand...

Well, we've always had the option of no gap between songs on CDs, but when played ( for me at least??? ) there was a slight gap ( less than a second ) that would sometimes cause a pop or click sound between the songs. Really annoyed me.
 
Cordless_Drill said:
I burn gapless cds all the time ... have been doing it for years with dead shows.

Never had a problem. I think the gap stuff is only for listening to the music via ipod/itunes.
Click to expand...

Interesting.... I just listened to the BEP CD I burned a few weeks ago and there is definitely a gap between track 1 and 2??? I have always had the "Gap between songs" option set to none....

Beats me, maybe it was just a problem with my setup??
Either way, I'm happy and I wanted to share. Maybe there are other poor souls that have been plagued with this affliction.
 
JackRipper said:
Interesting.... I just listened to the BEP CD I burned a few weeks ago and there is definitely a gap between track 1 and 2??? I have always had the "Gap between songs" option set to none....

Beats me, maybe it was just a problem with my setup??
Either way, I'm happy and I wanted to share. Maybe there are other poor souls that have been plagued with this affliction.
Click to expand...

I KNOW there's a setting for how long of a gap between tracks in the burn options for burning CDs. It defaults to two, but you can turn it to 0.

I do wish they would get some gapless playback action on the iPod tho... is this doable with AAC? I know that MP3 is completely unable to have actual gapless playback (it can be simulated, but that's it) and OGG is a gapless format, but is AAC? If they added gapless playback to the iPod, it would actually be enough incentive for me to re-rip everything.
 
mrgreen4242 said:
I do wish they would get some gapless playback action on the iPod tho... is this doable with AAC?
Click to expand...
Not sure if it's doable w/ AAC, but it's a limitation of the platform, IIRC. I've not read up on it in a while.

If the iPod could predict the next track (not difficult, really) and load it into the buffer before the current song ends, the transition could be done gaplessly. I'm not sure what sort of hit that would put on the life of the drive or on the "daily" battery life, though.

Then again, I'm guessing Apple already thought about that.
 
ChrisBrightwell said:
Not sure if it's doable w/ AAC, but it's a limitation of the platform, IIRC. I've not read up on it in a while.

If the iPod could predict the next track (not difficult, really) and load it into the buffer before the current song ends, the transition could be done gaplessly. I'm not sure what sort of hit that would put on the life of the drive or on the "daily" battery life, though.

Then again, I'm guessing Apple already thought about that.
Click to expand...

AAC is gapless, the itunes (or quicktime or whatever it is) encoder isnt, and the itunes player isnt as well. If you use Nero to encode AAC and play it back in foobar its gapless!

Additionally to those who say setting crossfade in itunes to 0 makes it gapless, it dosent, if it sounds good enough to you thats fine but the overlap it introduces is awful on dance cds
 
Man, that sucks! I just got at 20gig and I was shocked that I couldn't simply turn off the gaps like I do when burning a CD. I thought I waited long enough for the ipod technology to work out a lot of kinks, but apparently not long enough. This is really going to disrupt my enjoyment of stuff like radiohead and pink floyd where it's not clear where one song ends and another starts. Do I import those CDs as one track, making for annoying dis-ease of use and messing up my ability to use shuffle mode? Or do I just try to tolerate the clicks? It seems like such a simple thing to fix, but then I'm not a programmer, so what do I know. It's just irritating that the ipod is so ingenious in so many ways, and such an improvement over cds in terms of ease of use (I know sound quality is not better, but hey, that's why I collect vinyl too) but still can't do some basic things that cds can. Someday,...someday.
 
ChrisBrightwell said:
If the iPod could predict the next track (not difficult, really) and load it into the buffer before the current song ends, the transition could be done gaplessly.
Click to expand...
Exactly. It is definitely possibly, you'd just have to buffer both the current song and the beginning of the next song and butt up the waveforms. But as you say, that takes processing cycles and hence, power. I have already simulated this in Xcode by putting two songs as separate tracks in a QuickTime movie, tweaking the track offset of the second song, and playing across the junction. It can be done. However, that uses QuickTime for playback, which AFAIK the iPod does not.
 
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