Could we add gapless to Apple's AAC encoder?, task for iTunesencode or other? Options

[guruboolez]

I have a question about a possible new iTunesEncode feature (or any other program driving Apple's AAC encoder). Wouldn't it be possible to add a gapless feature? It might sound silly, but after all, nyaochi did it with the latest Fraunhofer MP3 encoder (here and here). I'm not a coding expert -I'm not a coder at all- but I think that doing it wouldn't be an impossible task.

Adding somewhere in the tags the precise offset (constant for Apple's encoder) and calculating the amount of padded sample maybe suffice? I don't really know. faac and Nero AAC are gapless, and apparently Apple is not hurry to implement this feature. It's a pity, because Apple's encoder is pretty good. Gapless playback is not possible on any iPod, but on a computer (playing with foobar2000 as exemple) users would benefits from it.

Could we reproduce Nyaochi's ACMenc patch to work with iTunes? Or make something similar? What do you think?

[M]

Pardon my ignorance on the technicalities involved, but doesn't the MPEG-4 structure allow for chapter stops, or index points of some sort? And if so, wouldn't it be simpler to re-encode an album as a single *.m4a file, with possible plugin or hardware support for using those indices? That would eliminate the entire problem of offsets, calculated or actual, and enable true gapless playback for any player that didn't choke on the metadata. (Yes, I realize this would entail encoding each album as a single, large track, and that it would require players to buffer portions of the track - ideally, to buffer until the next index/chapter marker - but in my end-user/non-programmer/non-hardware-designer/feeble brain the method just makes sense!)

- M.