Hello,

Is there a way to have gapless playback with an OSX application? I am not asking about FLAC or Ogg-Vorbis playback (hopeless perspective), just about plain MP3s. I have tried changing the crossfade playback settings in iTunes, but it does not always work. iTunes works very well with most of my music collection, but with some genres (like opera) this impossibility to play files gaplessly is a real pain considering the $2,000 I paid for my computer. When I think that my old 300Hz AMD PC could play any sound format without gaps (FLAC with foobar2k, for example)... A friend told me that a Mac would be a better choice for everything related to audio and I took gapless playback for granted. Sure my new Powerbook makes me look very cool, but I cannot even play 2 files without gaps! Maybe the solution is to get Virtual PC and run foobar2k. Has anybody tried this?

iTunes 5 is rumored to include true gapless encoding and playback (at least with AAC). As a temporary solution, you could encode classical music as one file..

Last time I checked, audio out quality from VirtualPC wasn't really all that great. The reason is that it's actually emulating in software the SB16 hardware. And they reduced the emulation accuracy to speed up the overall emulation (they also emulate video adapter, network interface, etc.). After all, VPC isn't really meant for high quality audio playback...

Just tested a song in fb2k in virtual pc 6, sounds identical to the same song playing in iTunes. CPU usage is a bit heavy here however (60-70%), and playback stutters if I have any large programs running as well, but this is only a 500 MHz G4.