Gapless Albums (ripping/minimizing gaps)

hey boogieman,

I just got my Ipod a few weeks ago too, and I'm going through the same annoying situation.

I talked to the guys at Applecare about this, and the Ipod "specialist" said there's no provision for removing the gap between tracks - which is ridiculous: there's zillions of hip-hop, and dj albums out there which are meant to be played seamlessly.

Perhaps there's a software patch out there that can fix this?

If anyone could help out, that'd be great!

thanks,

ooga-wooga

the newest version of iTunes has an option where you can go into preferences and set the gap time to 0 which then provides basically just one long song if you are combining tracks. So if you have 10 songs you want to burn to a CD say, and set the gap at 0, then you have 1 very long song as far as the pod is concerned. Hope that helps.

arjoderoon:

What sfpodman was saying, and what we've been tossing around, is how we can get around the issue of gaps in otherwise gapless music -- your dj mixes, my floyd albums, etc. -- and basically, the only way to do it -- I think -- is to set the gaps to 0 when ripping (I think).

I had a Denon CD player (well before all the burning, ripping and mp-3's were around) that had something called indexes; for cd's encoded with indexes, this feature could let you jump to an index within a song -- say, a classical piece or (in my case) the first track of Rush's 2112. That track is 30+ minutes long, but each "movement" within the track (specifically defined in the album's liner notes, btw) had its own index setting, so if you wanted to jump to "The Temples of Syrinx," you could; if (future) iPods had this feature I'd rip every single album this way that required it (every Floyd album save their GH albums and all my Zeppelin and Stevie Ray Vaughan bootlegs). I'm really pleased with my iPod, but I haven't put one live disc into my iTunes directory to avoid the spacing. I'm guessing I'm not alone, and I hope that future iPods don't have this limitation; if each tune can have a soundcheck setting (ie for volume), I doubt it would be that hard to have each album have its own setting (that would be easily accessible). I know iTunes has the ability to configure the begin and ending times of a track, but I'm guilty of not having experimented with that yet (at least on the iPod side).

Looks like yet another mini-project on which to embark ;-)

Hey gang, tried something new tonite after going to the apple store and asking the tweakers what to do on ripping CDs to get that nice cross over sound. One manager said it was impossible, and another said to just move the crossfade playback out to 12 seconds. So...I went into Preferences, then into Effects and set the crossfade out to 12 seconds and yahoo - some nice overlap of one track finishing and another starting. Not that it's as good as what you could do with a real mixer, but pretty darned good (Wake Up Apple - your customers are asking for this!!). Try it.

cheers, podman

honeybee1236 & sfpodman:

My problem is that both of these work-arounds (and they both accomplish what we're shooting for) work on the PC/Mac (computer) side...what about for playback on the iPod itself?

On the (PC) side, doing the cross-fade thing works well, as does the time method (ie shortening the track/s). Problem is, I'm much less concerned (personally) with the PC-side playback and much more concerned with the iPod's playback of these types of tracks. As I'm writing this, I'm tweaking playback of Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and it sounds like a CD (vis-a-vis the gaps, or lack thereof) playing in the background. But how about in the real world? I'll go out tomorrow morning, hop on a train, and the gaps are right back to where they were (or are they?).

As far as computer-based playback, I can use a number of other apps to accomplish gapless playback -- but my main concern is getting the iPod to do so (and, hopefully, do so on an album-by-album basis). Even if it were an "on-off" choice, having the ability to do this would, for me, change things in a big way; I'd have to start ripping all my live/bootleg discs (and I've got puh-lenty of 'em that are sitting and collecting dust b/c, thus far, I haven't even bothered).

That is what I did to have gapless playback on my iPod and yes it does work on the iPod. That was the whole purpose of doing it, for playback on my iPod.

Until they give use crossfade on the iPod this works fine for now.

Do a 5 song test in a standard playlist and transfer it to the iPod and see.

Plus this method works for all songs, even if they are different songs from different artist.

true gapless playback *is* possible for the iPod, but it requires some work
(forgive me if anyone else ran this idea and i happened to not read it)
first, convert files to .aif or whatever format you can use in a wave-editing program.
for something like a dj mix cd, you're going to snip the blank space from the start and end of the individual files, then join them (butting the very end of one soundwave with the very start of the next)
do this in a way that makes sense to you, ie: connect sections into chunks - i'll take a typical 1 hour mix cd and make 4 or more 'chapters' of the mix.
then convert these bits back into .mp3 and id tag em.
the space between said 'chapters' will be gaps, but for the duration of the connected chunks: no gaps.
one thing to keep in mind is that files over (i think) 24meg eat the iPod battery faster, which is why you might want to burn chunks instead of the whole mix. plus there's still *some* navigation possible.
hope that's clear and hope that helps
b

Just discovered this problem today, and considering how fantastic the iPod is for musos the world over, I'm slightly stunned by the fact that this doesn't seem to be possible.

How difficult can it be? Apart from the fact that the iPod tracks are store all over the place, surely the 10 minute anti-jog memory could cue the next track to play seemlessly?

Apple, sort it out. Please please please.

using Nero you can set the time, in seconds, between each track you choose, but burning nonstop cds isnt the problem here