was HW: Vinyl, t-shirts, etc. now "iPods"

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 20/03/2007 16:47, Steve Freight wrote:
> One interesting point that I have had is that MP3's in my experience put 
> a 2
> second gap in between tracks (do they still do this?). This can be VERY
> annoying when listening to live stuff of medleys (Try Space Ritual with 2
> second gaps between each track or the second side of the beatles Abbey
> Road).

I _think_ this is a limitation of the MP3 codec, I believe.  You can get 
around this by using software that will rip multiple CD tracks to a 
single file and turning that into an MP3 (or extracting the tracks as 
WAV files and then gluing them together as a single WAV file in an audio 
editor), or by not using MP3s and using a audio file format that 
supports "gapless" playback.

iTunes for example, will let you designate contiguous CD tracks to be 
ripped as a single file, and more recent versions allow you to designate 
tracks/albums as "gapless", specifically to avoid this problem (this 
works with MP4 files, like AAC and Apple Lossless).  See 
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304362>; Steve Jobs used 
the Beatles and Floyd as examples of exactly why he wanted a solution 
for this. :)  Even so, I've read claims that there is actually an 
_extremely_ tiny gap with Apple's "gapless" system, but I'm not sure if 
this is real as, if it exists, it seems well too short for detection by 
most human ears.

You may be able to get some form gapless playback with oggs or FLAC 
files, too, though these aren't supported for playback in iTunes, so I 
haven't tried it.  I never really liked MP3s, though they were a good 
first step for online audio in some ways, and this is one of the reasons 
why.

Cheers,
Carl

-- 
Carl Edlund Anderson
mailto:cea at carlaz.com
http://www.carlaz.com/