Gapless / continuous / nonstop playing of MP3 tracks

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INQB8R Community / COMMON / Gapless / continuous / nonstop playing of MP3 tracks

Author	Message
INQB8R Admin	# Posted: 11 Jul 2008 18:06 - Edited by: INQB8R Reply Gapless format is often used in such recordings as live concerts or DJ sets. It means all tracks are following each after other without pauses between them. When you listen to an Audio CD recorded in such format, it usually won't bring any troubles, because Audio format has its own specifics and it's burned out by a different method, if such nonstop approach is used. On INQB8R we have a concept to create nonstop-mix of tracks regarding some EPs which require a careful listening from the beginning 'till the end. If such EP marked as "gapless" on its description page, your player must support continuous playing of tracks, for you to enjoy such release in "full pleasure". For example, under so far the most popular Winamp MP3 player and most likely other software MP3 players there is nothing special to do regarding our releases, they should all support gapless timing by default. For hardware players, you must refer to their documentation and/or firmware or search web for instructions on how to setup this mode, if it's not available by default. If something doesn't work like it should, and you still hear pauses in our continuous release, please inform us in this thread.
gosh Member	# Posted: 30 Sep 2008 17:11 Reply I suggest to try Musicutter for creating gaplessly playable mp3s, which will be played without gaps even without fiddling with Buffer Length or other settings. In other words, the listener will not have to adjust anything. The problem with gaps arises not due to the mp3 player settings, but because of mp3 frame length issues, due to which, if you encode a bunch of your WAVs into mp3, a tiny silence will be added to the end and possibly to the start of each mp3. When you use Musicutter, you encode to mp3 the UNCUT wav file. Then you run Musicutter, specify song times - or much better, just feed the .cue sheet file into it - and it slices your big mp3 into separate mp3s. Works as a charm, tested dozens of times. No gaps, ever :)
INQB8R Admin	# Posted: 30 Sep 2008 19:18 - Edited by: INQB8R Reply Thank you very much for this advice, very useful... we will re-master Sweeping Logic's release soon then and try to avoid these mistakes in the future. Learning never stops!
INQB8R Admin	# Posted: 1 Oct 2008 14:04 - Edited by: INQB8R Reply Just to add a note: Sweeping Logic's EP is now rebuild following real gapless tactics, so everybody is welcome to reset Winamp settings to defaults and enjoy it again. Since then we have fixed our first message in this topic as well. Welcome to the new continuous world ;-) P.S. It took some time for us to figure out what kind of Plain text format "musiCutter" needs for loading up the proper track list. After couple of hours investigation we have concluded it should be in such format (as for Sweeping Logic example): 1/00m 00s 00f 2/04m 48s 25f 3/08m 20s 40f 4/10m 31s 05f 5/15m 14s 31f 6/18m 03s 56f 7/21m 38s 22f 8/22m 53s 57f Digits before "m" mean minutes, "s" stands for seconds and "f" probably means frames, or parts of the second, and this is the most difficult moment to calculate. Unfortunately "musiCutter" help files are very weak and do not explain everything. Specially, they do not explain how to deal with records which last more than a hour - but on our label fortunatelly we won't need it ;-) and this schema is enough.