Hello!

I searched for "gapless" in this forum and didn't come up with anything useful regarding CD based MP3 players. The question is: Can anyone provide a list with some players supporting gapless (or semi-gapless) playback of MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files? It is OK for me if the player simply skips the silence, so no need for LAME tag support or whatever foobar2000 does.

Regards,
Sebastian Mares

Does anyone know if the Sony CD Walkman players have gapless MP3 playback? My current player adds a 5 seconds gap between tracks so it isn't a pleasure listening to Pink Floyd.

The only portable DAP that I know of that supports gapless mp3 playback is the Rio Karma. So to answer your question: No, no CD players w/mp3 support will have gapless mp3 playback.

Hello,

If by "gapless" you mean a CD/MP3 player that doesn't add 2-3 seconds of seek time between tracks then you need look no further than the iRiver series of CD/MP3 players. Each of them, down to the humble iMP-50 (which I own) plays MP3 tracks right after the other, with no more than a fraction of a second of silence between them -- much like Winamp does.

BTW, the iRiver players also offer a bunch of excellent programming/control features you won't find anywhere else, like fast scanning within tracks, resume within tracks, and a lot more.

Hope this helps.

iRiver players don't do gapless Vorbis, though, AFAIK.

http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware

Freemax FW-960 or mpman MP-CD550 can play back Vorbis gaplessly, with the right firmware. Princeton Pocket Beat airCD and Saisonic SCD-X10 use the same chip, so they might support gapless playback too, but I'm not sure.

In my experience, Sony MP3 CDP's actually tend to be among the worst in terms of gap length between songs, which has been 4-5 seconds on three players I have had (or tried out). I think this is due to the fact that they do not start loading the next song into the flash RAM buffer until the current one has completed.

I have played a bit with the iMP-550, but was disappointed to see that it introduces a 3 seconds gap between songs.

The karma is the only player which supports true gapless playback.

True gapless = ignoring samples at the end and at the beginning based on header information (like MPC, Vorbis and recent Lame versions with adapted decoders do), and NOT ignoring samples based on volume level.

Can the Karma do that?

I heard the Karma does gapless playback of LAME mp3, Vorbis, and FLAC.

But then, the Karma isn't a CD based player.

My experience differs. I've owned an iMP-550 for some months now, and gaps are quite short -- almost imperceptible in some cases.

It may help to reset or upgrade the firmware.

+1, i have a imp-550 also and i would evaluate gap to 0.1s or less.

I can confirm this. The latest firmware for the Karma (v. 1.68) supports the LAME header/tag information to playback with true gapless. True gapless is also supported with FLAC and Vorbis. Previous firmware had the gapless support for both FLAC and Vorbis, but concerning mp3, it used the method where it would ignore samples based upon volume level to achieve perceptual gapless.

Could you prove that the Karma is really decoding the LAME tag? The firmware changelog does not specify this behaviour.

http://forums-riovolution.com/index.php?sh...indpost&p=46154

Cool, maybe my posts about this on the Riovolution forums - last year - have paid off...

http://forums-riovolution.com/index.php?sh...t=30&#entry2822
http://forums-riovolution.com/index.php?showtopic=569&st=0&

I think all the posts by Dibrom helped a little bit too...

[off topic]So I'm assuming Dibrom has owned a Karma or currently owns one?[/off topic]