The fact that a set of mp3s have small snippets of dead air between them when played in winamp (2.91 x86) only until I configure the buffering settings and check the "Remove the silence at the beginning/end of track" checkbox, means that the gaps still exist, winamp just doesn't allow them anymore, right? Thus, even with checking Nero's 'remove the 2-second silence" box, there will still be those gaps after I've burned the cd, correct?
This goes for installing gapless plugins as well; just because the player has been altered to allow gapless play, doesn't mean the gaps are gone and therefore one more step has to be made to the tracks before burning for future players such as a home or car stereo to read the tracks 'gaplessly' (I think?)

Thanks in advance. B)

Correct.

What you can do (if you're talking about burning audio CDs not mp3 (data) CDs): Use remove silence/crossfade plugin and use diskwriter plugin for writing a single .wav file from all mp3s you want to burn (should work with foobar2000 too). Now - if you still want to be able to access the tracks seperately - create a cue sheet (for details you might want to do a forum search) and burn using it.

I do this through winamp? If so, how?

And then I write a cue & split w/ EAC or something? I don't have the album's original track times, and not all of the tracks have been chosen from an album, just selections I prefer. So, I'd be going off of track starting & stop times by looking in winamp -- won't the cue just split the wav to exactly the same spots as before the wav conversion, effectively changing nothing?

Sorry - I can't tell exactly as I haven't used winamp for some time. There are wavwriter /diskwriter plugins that you can try but I'm not completely sure that they won't write seperate tracks.

If this doesn't work you could get one gapless .wav file by
- playing back with winamp+crossfeed/... and capturing winamp's output with totalrecorder or similar
- use a wave editor like Audacity (free) or Cool Edit to edit aut silence / crossfade.


You don't need to split the .wav file. IIRC cue sheet editors exist but I prefer creating/editing cue sheets manually. Easiest way (IMO): Extract one of your CDs with EAC: create single wav + cue sheet, open the cue sheet with a text editor and edit track titles, playtimes etc.

No - if done correctly. Immagine a live CD with applause between tracks. If you copy it with EAC single .wav + cue sheet there won't be gaps in the copy but you can access the tracks seperately. You can use foobar2000 to check if everything works as expected: It can play back audio files using cue sheets (IIRC a winamp plugin for Cue Sheets exists as well). Drag'n'drop the cue sheet on fb2k - everything should work the same way as the CD you'll burn.
I usually burn cue sheets with EAC's burning function so I can't tell if there can be problems with nero.

I always burn EAC-created cuesheets with Nero, as EAC's burning part makes my machine spontaneously reboot. For what it's worth, I've never run into any problems.