Hi,

about the gap in playback in apple lossless.

Turning Itunes crossfade setting to 0 and leaving the function on will help.

I found that using an external sound card (Audigy NX in conjunction with a Vaio PCG-FRV35 through USB 2.0) increased the little blip which can be heard when the track is advanced. Using the onboard sound card reduced the blip considerably, as did playback from the on board notebook hard drive. My external drive is a new maxtor 200 GB through firewire.

I must say that the blip has only been troublesome in my case with choral or opera recordings where the editors have separated tracks in the middle of song or music.

Conclusion:
In my case the audible gap seems on the hardware side to be product of data throughput problems and/or integration of the processing capacity of the sound blaster and the notebook cpu.

I will be upgrading to an external DAC.

My questions:

1. Someone posted a listing as saying that the Audigy external sound cards do not generate a bit for bit accurate digital out. Does anyone know more about this?

2. Does anyone know if using an external DAC will also affect the gap problem?

3. Are there any speculations on the future of the codec? Is there a possilibty that it will either become incompatible with future os's, or that future DRM will substantively compromise its flexibility?

4. Does FLAC also have a gap in playback? If not, has anybody transcoded apple lossless to FLAC, particularly those pesky opera (or for that matter techno) pieces and did a Rule 8 test?

Many thanks

- Richard -

As the name suggests, lossless codecs are lossless, there is nothing to "test" with FLAC "transcoded" from Apple lossless because contained data is the same.
Gapped playback is a problem with Apple's playback software architecture, not with the codec itself; iTunes can't play uncompressed formats like AIFF without gaps either.

The music that you encode is not going to be affected by any DRM issue. Only the music you download from music stores is DRMed.


Transcoding is not a problem with lossless. It is rather repackaging than transcoding, because the base data is exactly the same no matter how many times you do it.

So if your player replays FLAC without a gap, go ahead! You will enjoy gapless playback and the music will be the same.

The music that you encode is not going to be affected by any DRM issue. Only the music you download from music stores is DRMed.

My question could be better framed by asking whether future versions of Itunes will go down the slippery slope of say Sony's MD software, which is a direct attempt to slap DRM on your own encoded music?

[quote]4. Does FLAC also have a gap in playback? If not, has anybody transcoded apple lossless to FLAC, particularly those pesky opera (or for that matter techno) pieces and did a Rule 8 test?
[/quote]
Transcoding is not a problem with lossless. It is rather repackaging than transcoding, because the base data is exactly the same no matter how many times you do it.

So if your player replays FLAC without a gap, go ahead! You will enjoy gapless playback and the music will be the same.
[/quote]

Here the issue for me was whether the envelope created for music data by apple lossless encoding in any way remained present even after "repackaging"? And if so whether this could impact on gapless playing in another codec. I know that these are part redundant questions, but perhaps they bear short but precise scrutiny.

Thanks for your replys!

Thank you for reading my reply. Not.

Gaps are not present in encoded data in your Apple Lossless files; iTunes or whatever you use use to play your files adds them when playing them back.

iTunes is a great interface slapped on top of not so great working code.