Hi everyone,

this is my first post in this forum, even I have been reading for some months because of my interest for MP3 compression and the LAME encoder in particular.

Well, my question is about encoding WAV-ripped files using EAC (0.9 beta 3) into MP3 using LAME (3.90.2 Dibrom's compiles).

I have one album (Gloria Estefan's "gloria!") that features 11 tracks without any silence between the tracks. As I wanted to listen to the entire album keeping separate MP3 tracks, I ripped and then encoded the entire album into MP3. Also I downloaded the two gapless plug-ins for WinAmp to check how they worked.

But it didn't work. I still could notice a little gap between tracks playing them with WinAmp 2.78c and any of the two gapless plug-ins.

I thought: "Maybe the gapless plug-ins don't work right for me". But looking at the reviews in other sites, I wasn't sure about this. So I tried another approach: I ripped the first and second tracks with EAC and opened them with Cool Edit, then I highlighted the end of the first track and the beginning of the second track. Right, there is no silence. The audio extraction with EAC worked just plain fine. I also tried listening to the tracks with WinAmp and I couldn't hear any jump between both tracks. So both EAC and WinAmp were working as expected.

It had to be the LAME encoder ' I made the same operation I do always: rip the tracks with EAC and compress them with LAME.exe (alt-preset standard) automatically within EAC. Then I opened the file and... Alas! There is 0.04 seconds of silence at the end of the first track and 0.05 seconds of silence at the begining of the second track, creating a deadly mood-breaking silence between both tracks...

After this long explanation, what I would want to know is if there is a possible solution for this, apart of ripping the CD entirely (as a WAV image) and then using a WinAmp plugin to navigate the big MP3 file

Thanks in advance for all your help and keep the great work here, I appreciate most of what it's discussed in this forum; I learn a lot

Ignacio CB

Valencia, Spain, Europa

What's a well know flaw in the lame encoder.
Nothing really you can do.
You could use the command --nogap but it's still experimental and not finished - or use another format

Be sure also that you are not adding id3-tags. That can also be a problem.



Jan.

Hi Iceberg. You can't use the "--nogap" command with EAC (yet), because EAC shuts down the encoder between tracks and the "--nogap" command requires the encoder to stay open until all tracks are encoded. However, there is a good, free frontend available from Speek which is able to do gapless encoding. It is called Wav2Lame, and you can download it from his frontend pages. http://home.wanadoo.nl/~w.speek/w2l.htm

With this version, simply check the "Gapless" button (not shown in the screenshot) and set your output directory in the "Output folder" box - W2L will translate those actions into the "--nogap" and "--nogapout" switches.

- M.

As I said --nogap is still experimental and it can and will lead to problems especially with vbr files.

the last time i checked MAD broke down with vbr --nogap files.

i din't know which plugins u donwloaded, but

"SqrSoft Advanced Crossfading" plugin

worx for me quite fine.
(just turn gap killer on and experiment a bit with triggers).
then no matter if you play mp3's, mpc's or sth. else

i posted the same question a few weeks ago...
it was not answered! :mad:

but... sorry there is no real solution, unless for you to trim (manually because the gap is too small for mp3trim, for instance) the final gap. i didn't experiment accurate gapless plug-ins, too.
moreover, the gap length is randomly set sometimes at the end or at the beginning (this belongs to lame and isn't cleared for the moment, even with --nogap which don't work fine with vbr --alt-presets)...
and if you want to decode your mp3 then burn them, the gap will still be there and longer in the decoded wav!

and that's why i switched to mpc because this format provides files with exactly the same length as the originals and a better quality (this has been fully proven) for the same average bitrate.


so if portability does not matter for you (e.g. you have portable mp3 player or you trade mp3 files...) replace your:

lame --alt-preset standard
by:
mppenc --xtreme

at your service,
pipo.