Hello to everyone

Here is my problem : I encoded a live music to mp3 using lame. The sound was awesome but unfortunately, I couldn't get rid of the gaps between the tracks when listening to them in Winamp, even with a gapless output plug-in. I did a bit of research on these forums and found a thread explaining that it was due to a problem within the mp3 format and that the only solutions were either to rip the whole CD as one track and use a cue sheet (I've already tried this, I'm just fed up with this approach) or to encode to another format. Some more research led me to think that MPC and OGG were the best candidates.
I encoded a bunch of tracks to MPC first and it played perfectly without any gaps. I then tried encoding to OGG but then it was a disaster, with gaps just as bad, if not worse than mp3. I tried messing around with the output plug-in settings (tried a standard gapless output, and the expermental Direct sound ) but had no luck.
So my question is "Is OGG truly gapless and if it is, what did I do wrong ?" Again, the MPC files were working flawlessly. Any input is appreciated.
For the record, I ripped the files with CDEX 1.50 beta 5 and encoded to OGG using Winlame. Thanks in advance for any help

Can't tell you what went wrong, but my live encodings are as gapless as they can be. I use EAC (or Soundforge for recording analogue source) and Oggdrop XPd. My last encodings in EAC are done with oggenc commandline encoder and it works excellent as well.

Emanuel

Coincidently I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to get gapless Ogg playback to work. It is possible, Ogg does support this feature. I haven't tried using Winamp but on Linux it was just a case of installing xmms-crossfade and using the gap-killer feature. I think all it's doing is stopping the soundcard from opening and closing between tracks. It's actually an excellent plugin - I tested it on the medley at the end of Abbey Road and the whole thing was absolutely seamless. You need to disable actual cross-fading of course ;-)

I guess this isn't much help to you since you're using Winamp but at least you know it's possible.

I don't have any problem with winamp to play .ogg files gaplessly. Just install one of PP's outputplugins and enable gapless. Done!

Get this: http://www.blorp.com/~peter/zips/wa2update.exe and try with the included waveOut or DirectSound plug-in. They are gapless by default. If you still have no luck, try to increase the "Buffer-ahead on track change" setting.

What I'm about to describe is just a curiosity for now. The solutions you are providing are easiest to achieve.

You can concatenate a series of .ogg files into one big .ogg file that now has multiple vorbis streams. The playback will be (hopefully) gapless. For me it worked.

It seems like a feature in vorbis (a la QuickTimeTM).

PS: seems like musiCutter can do that, but I didn't tried the program.

The DirectSound output plug-in included in the Wa2 update works like a charm.
My oggs are now gapless. Thanks to everyone for the help.