Gapless playback now on iPods

[twouptons]

I know gapless playback of MP3s has been a sore subject on here in the past...
At yesterday's new product announcement, Apple announced support for gapless playback on its new iPods and through iTunes.
I can vouch for the gapless playback in iTunes, and it is far better than the old cross-fade way of doing it. And it does it on plain old MP3s, not just their AAC things.

My iPod is over a year old, so I haven't tried it yet, but I've heard rumors that the 5th generation iPods should at least be able to do this (in addition to the ones announced yesterday).

-Eric

[S33BBY]

What's this all about? After installing iTunes 7 last night, I noticed my library and iPod having something done to do with gapless playback.

[MiniNewbie82]

What is gapless playback? I own an ipod photo and love it, but have no idea what this means.

[Haggi]

means that it works like a good cd player and skips the blank space between two tracks

[Maui]

Is this now downloadable for old Ipods from i net?

[twouptons]

I just plugged in mine and it said it was still up to date.
I'll have to replace all the music and see if that changes anything or if it is a new iPod only sort of thing.
Or maybe they'll update the software later...

-Eric

[snid]

I haven't messed with my iPod yet, but I do know that in iTunes you have the ability to mark a song as "Part of a gapless album". Click on a sing, command-i to open the info window, go to the "Options" tab, and there's a checkbox for that.

That's about all I know about the situation, though.

[rkw]

The gapless feature is very significant for classical music. Long continuous segments of music (e.g., a movement in a Mahler symphony, Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, etc.) are often broken up on a CD into multiple tracks. On a CD player, they play continuously through with no interruption. However if the CD was imported directly to iTunes, it will play with pauses in the middle of the music. Until now, the only way I knew to avoid this was to use the "Join CD tracks" feature before importing. It was very annoying that you couldn't just pop in a CD and let it import. You had to manually select and join the tracks before importing (not possible to join them afterwards). If you missed a track, you had to re-import the entire segment. I haven't tried it yet but hopefully this gapless feature will solve the problem.

[snid]

I just found out what that "Part of a gapless album" setting for the songs is for. If you have "crossfade" playback turned on in iTunes, setting the "part of a gapless album" switch will disable crossfading for that song. IiTunes help tried to explain it like this:

Quote:

Some CDs, such as live concert albums and classical albums, are meant to be played straight through, with no fading between the songs (or tracks). If you turn on Crossfade Playback, you can have iTunes turn it off when you play these albums.

So, with crossfade on and the gapless album switch not set, it will crossfade between tracks on the album, which is not what you want for a "gapless" album. Setting the gapless album switch disables crossfading for those songs.