This depends on the type of music. With pop and rock music its less a problem. But with certain experimental and especially ambient music this "10th of a second" translates into an ugly "click", or (if crossfading is used) asynchronous rythm for a moment which sticks out of the rest of the music like a hornet.

- Lyx

Of course it is bothering me. In addition to what Lyx said, it can be extremely annoying and even devastating to both mood and music when listening to a concert recording and such a gap occurs during intense applause or even a segue between two tracks. It's simply not acceptable.

(by the way, it should be obvious that crossfading plugins are a rather insufficient solution because they are guaranteed to break the rhythm on segues)

On top of that I have several "normal" studio rock albums with crossfaded / seamless track transitions. Wouldn't want these to break either.

I frankly don't understand why some people have difficulties to understand why gapless playback can play an important role in enjoying one's music. Does your collection consist exclusively of songs that fade out to silence at the end of each track or something?

I understand that you find it annoying, I'm just uncertain why. I listen to live albums and that short gap in the clapping just doesn't bother me. I don't see how it's "devastating" to the mood or the music.


I agree. If it's going to be done, it should be done correctly.


No, but the gap does not bother me on live albums or comedy albums or what have you. I'm listening to the music, not the gap. It doesn't interrupt the flow for me. I have this thing called a brain that seems to be capable of ignoring it.

I grasp that it matters to you. I'm just trying to understand why, that's all. Don't take offense at the question needlessly. All I'm saying is that gapless is not important to me and I don't see why it's important to you (or anybody else) when it's such a minor thing.

Other than live albums, I appreciate gapless playback for albums that are supposed to flow together, just about any Pink Floyd album, or Poe's Haunted for a modern example.

I strongly disagree that it's a minor thing. For example, I often use the built-in MP3 player of my mobile phone (Nokia 6230) to listen to some music while I'm doing other things. This is just to have some background music, I'm not actively listening to it, let alone concentrating on it. And even then, when there is suddenly a gap between tracks where there shouldn't be one, I immediately notice it and it disturbs me, no matter what I'm doing ("damn, that was another one of those"). Like those gaps "jump out" on me and break my concentration for whatever I was doing. And no, I'm not exaggerating.

As you hinted before, maybe your brains are wired differently.

Also, consider this: when you listen to an album on an MP3 player, you expect it to sound identical to the original album, right? So on all hardware players except for the Rio Karma, this is not true, so the playback is inherently flawed.

Remember, all CD players on this planet, even the oldest or cheapest ones, have gapless playback. Hell, even vinyl has it.

So why can't the latest and greatest state-of-the art audio playback devices have it?

To conclude: I have the exact opposite feelings about the issue than you: for years now, I'm having trouble understanding why so many people don't care about gapless playback. My best guess so far was that most of today's kids almost never listen to full albums, but listen to individual songs instead.

Must be, because I rarely notice it, even when listening to Pink Floyd.


No, not really. I'm just generally not paying attention enough to the music to tell any difference. It's in the background for the most part.


You're probably right there. I usually don't listen to entire albums, because most albums are 90% suck. There are exceptions, but I don't usually listen to them all in one flowing piece anyway. I like variety. Listening to a complete album all the way I kinda consider to be a phase I grew out of in the early-90's. I'm more interested in hearing random selections of good music in a nice mix. It's more interesting and less boring, IMO.

Lately I've been taking to removing sections of albums from my list of songs to put on the iPod, as I have more music on the PC than fits on the iPod. I remove them usually because I only like one or two songs on the album. If I wanted to listen to a complete album, I'd pop in the CD. Having the portable player is to have a large collection of good songs, to me. I mean, I don't need a whole album playback device. I have several CD players already.

I listen a lot to drone ambient and other sorts of soundscapes. 90% of my albums have seamless trackchanges, which let the listener float from track to track. When one of the trackchanges isnt perfectly seamless, I get a really nasty feeling inside my head and believe me, that feeling REALLY is disturbing.

(being said by an iPod owner )

I have a theory on this: The fact that you have such trouble understanding us leads me to suspect that you're probably pretty dense - which of course might help you ignore non-gapless playback.


(oh yes, and the fact that you perceive 90% of your albums' content as "suck" probably suggests that you should find something else to listen to)

To be fair, he didn't say 90% of albums suck, but that 90% of the songs on a single album often suck.

To remind folks, there are at least 2 types of gap going on. First is the inherent gap of mp3 which is the silence between the end of the original CD track and the end of a frame which is typically around 1/100 second (could be zero). The second, which is *much* more annoying, is the delay when your player reaches the end of a file and has to start loading the next one... could be 1/10 second to a couple of seconds.

The latter is fixed by having the player start loading the next file before the current one is over.

The former is fixed by either a gapless format (such as vorbis) or some scheme where the player knows it is supposed to skip the unused part of the last frame.
Either way the improvement won't be noticed unless the larger gap has already been addressed.

If you bought a new CD that had gaps between songs that were meant to flow together seamlessly, wouldn't you consider that a problem? ...even a defect?

Thanks for contributing some irrelevant nitpicking. My post is edited for clarity now. Not that it changes the argument in any way.

(sorry 'bout adding even more irrelevance to this thread)

I dunno. I doubt I'd notice it, really. When the gap is so small, it doesn't bother me.

What I'm saying is that I don't even hear it unless I'm specifically listening for it. It's like the distortion sound that you often get on cymbals when you use too low a bitrate for the music you're encoding. I don't generally hear it unless I'm listening for it and trying to hear that distortion. It's such a minor not even noticable thing that I don't put it high on my list of priorities when choosing hardware.

I mean, the iPod has a gap problem. I knew that when I bought it. I didn't much care, because it was not a priority. I'm just trying to get why people place so much importance on gapless playback around here. I find that ease of use, shuffle capability, playlist capability, configurability, all these things are way more important.

And yet around here you have people saying that if it can't play gapless then it's not actually a music player. WTF? That just makes no sense to me.

I get that different people have different priorities, but why is gapless so high on your list, that's all I want to know. So far, only PoisonDan and .zolder have tried to give a good, serious answer, and I thank them for it. It helped.

For me, the smart playlist capability of the iPod was at the top of my priority list. The ability to have an ever changing automatically updated selection of songs sorted according to parameters I can change and adjust is exactly what I want. It defines how I listen to music. I hate having to create playlists by hand and micromanage my listening, I want to be able to define a set of rules or parameters and let the system choose for me. I enjoy those pleasent surprises when a song pops up that I haven't heard in a while, that sort of thing. That's why I place it so high on my priority list. I understand that this is not for everybody, and that a lot of people like to listen to complete albums instead. But I can explain why my priorities are the way they are. And that's all I'm looking for with regard to the gapless playback thing.


Wow. My theory is that you're being a jerk mainly because you can't answer the questions satisfactory even to yourself.


No, I quite like what I listen to. However that doesn't change the fact that most albums have 2 or maybe 3 good songs. There's the occasional exception, but hey, even the best artist in the world came up with a lot of stinkers.

No, I'm being a jerk because your exceptional inability to accept the points other people make (sometimes even blatantly ignoring them, like the ones I brought up) makes it hard for me to actually take you seriously.

I mean, which part of "on live albums and seamlessly mixed studio albums gaps disrupt rhythm and atmosphere" do you fail to understand?

Interesting, on a majority of the albums I've bought there are max. 2 or 3 songs I don't care much for. I have concerts longer than three hours which don't contain a single bad song in my opinion.

I wonder whether that's somehow related to the particular genres you're listening to or maybe to your listening habits (are not taking enough time to actually let an entire album sink in and thus perceiving less catchy songs to be of lower quality?).

I might be able to take you seriously if you brought up *any* points or made one post without insulting me for asking the question in the first place, which you have yet to do.


The part where you fail to say "I only listen to live and seamlessly mixed albums, and I never listen to anything that's under an hour of continuous music, so clearly I want gapless playback because all my listening fits into that category" or some other form of explanation that actually EXPLAINS something.

Just saying that "live and other seamlessly mixed albums do, in fact, exist" tells me nothing I didn't already know, thank you very much. I understand why gapless is needed. But that wasn't what I frickin' asked. I asked why is it so important to you. I was looking for your opinion. I was looking for you to explain your opinion. I was looking for an insight into why you feel the way you feel about the issue in question.

But clearly this is beyond your mental capabilities, so just don't bother anymore, eh? I don't want your answer. I got the answers I wanted from others in the thread who can write a post without being intentionally insulting.

It's important to me because I find it nice to be able to listen to a CD and not have to notice that the track changed. Think of it as driving without traffic lights or stop signs, sans death.

Gapless playback is important to me because I like to hear the album the way it was meant to be heard, such as Dark Side of the Moon, it just sounds better with out the gaps. I can ignore the gaps as you have said, but is it not better to just get rid of the gaps all together if possible? It doesn't ruin the album for me to hear a fraction of a second pause between tracks, but there is no reason we should be limited to listening to an album with gaps when there wasn't meant to be gaps there.

damn dude, you're thick. Yes, not all of my albums are 100% continous, but some are. I don't need total gapless playback 100% of the time, but I do need it the 30% of the time (or whatever) when I'm listening to an album that has continous parts.

You clearly only listen to each track individually and never even know whats its like to hear a skip between live tracks. If you're the kind of person who doesn't mind pausing and skipping some of the time, then you're also the kind of person who doesn't mind artifacting all over the place like with 128kbps encoding.

I for one listen to a lot of electronic music. Screwing up a smooth studio mix = [this is bad]

Otto42 - just let it go! You either get it, or you don't. People have said why.

"I was looking for your opinion. I was looking for you to explain your opinion. I was looking for an insight into why you feel the way you feel about the issue in question."

Tautology

Gaps are really annoying to me too with certain albums.
The reason?. Well suppose you are listening to a great Metallica live album. With gapless playback you can almost pretend you´re there at James´ side. You´re just another guy in the crowd. That nasty little gap (no matter how short if it´s audible) destroys all that magic.
At least that is my feeling and my personal opinion.

Operas, symphonies, sonatas... many classical compositions need gapless playback. It's highly important.

The way I see it is that when there is a gap where there shouldn't be one, it's really no different than, say, having an audio artifact in the middle of a song. If you truly don't mind a popping sound or other auditory anomoly between gapless tracks that should instead flow seemlessly into one another, then you certainly wouldn't mind it at all if you had a popping sound in the middle of every song you listen to. Right Otto42? Sorry, but you just can't have it both ways. Or are you implying that we might as well just all stop wasting our time doing endless ABX tests and just use ATRAC, WMA, or some other bad codec from now on? After all, you obviously seem to think audio anomolies don't matter.

PS: I've been noticing lately that more and more albums seem to be gapless in some form or another. Look at Shania's Twain's Up! red, green, and blue albums for example. Every single track is gapless on all of them I believe. In fact I have quite a few gapless albums now, and only one of them is actually a live performance (Tori Amos).

That experience is called vinyl!

Here's a suggestion.. all the discussion here won't change anyone's portable player, unless a firmware developer reads the forum (been known to happen).

How about an encoder that detects gapless track boundaries and puts those sets of tracks out as single files? Folks who consider an album to be an ininteruptable single event wouldn't be seeking into the middle anyhow, right?

not true..... sometimes I enjoy the experience that is an entire album, soemtimes I just want single tracks. but when I want an entire album, I don't want the experience ruinied.

Another good reason for gapless playback is seamless albums such as Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral, sometimes have track changes in strange places, that actually interrupt the song.... this isn't so noticable if you're listening to individual tracks, you're generally paying less attention. But there are those of us, who will sit and ACTIVELY listen to music, in which case you're focusing on everything, and gaps ruin the effect.

I think you've hit on an important point here. There are two kinds of people when it comes to music, and this might provie a clue as to the two sides arguing here.

First, there are those that actively listen to music. I'm one of those. Turn down the light, get comfy on the couch, close my eyes, and just listen with zero distractions. This is the best way to listen IMHO. The whole world falls away as the music carries you off someplace else, much like a good book. Even a minor noise or distraction is enough to pull me out of that.

Then there are those that have music as a constant droning noise in the background, doing nothing more than than that. I have a friend who is like this. The music never ever stops at his place. Something is always playing, but nobody is ever actually listening to it. I highly doubt this kind of person would ever notice anything amiss, maybe not even if the CD started skipping here and there lol.

Digisurfer - I'm a little of both. My speakers hardly ever turn off, and there are certainly times each day where I'll turn it up and do nothing, and put on some tunes that are more ... worthy.

Even when I'm inactively listening, a skip makes me jump. If someone pulls the plug on the mic at a poetry reading, people will notice.

I was under the impression that the gaps are caused by shitty CD rippers leaving the final frame(s) of the MPEG stream full of 00000000 when they should really just trim the frame so the music fits in perfectly. While some mp3 players treat a string of nulls terminating a stream as "move onto the next file" (which usually results in gapless playback, as there's a second or so of filled sound buffer in which to open and start decoding the file), others don't, because the gap might have been meant to there.

Of course I'm probably talking out of my ass.

However, I find that if I'm listening to, say, Decapitated the gaps make no real difference to the "listening experience" (man I sound pretentious) but they can completely kill the effect of Autechre and friends.

More or less, yeah. I doubt I'd notice a single pop in the music. I would hear it if I was listening intently, of course, but during normal circumstances, I probably wouldn't notice it.


No, now you're talking about a different issue. Encoder and format choice and so forth leads to an improvement in the whole track, not just one small blip of it. I certainly do hear annoying artifacts caused by poor encoding, mainly because they're continous. They take place throughout the entire track. When there's an annoying noise happening every 3 seconds in the background, you can tell, sort of thing.


Ack. I wouldn't listen to Shania Twain if I was paid to do so.


Yeah, I agree with you. I never do that. Music happens while I'm doing something else. Focusing on some other task, I mean. I usually have something playing when I'm using the computer or when I'm programming at work or driving or what have you. But I never listen to music and just sit there listening. Seems dull.

But at the same time, I don't have constant music like your friend does. I know people who have that, but I prefer silence when I'm reading or doing some other things like that.

And this is the whole "problem" and reason for the different opinions:

Active listening and passive listening.

If someone is actively listening to a type of music which is best enjoyed by listening to complete albums (the most extreme example are albums which dont really consist of different "songs" but which instead are one large big track divided into "chapters") and which have seamless trackchanges...... then gapless playback is a very important issue.

Agreed, this is irrelevant to 95% of listeners and music - but for the remaining 5% its important because of the above reasons.

- Lyx

Gapless playback is an important option to have, IMO. I've read the posts and not replied until now.

People can debate this issue until they are blue in the face and frankly that appears to be what is going to happen. As has been stated, people listen to music differently. Until everyone reaches a level of acceptance that others listen differently then the entire debate is moot.

I listen to all kinds of music from classical to heavy metal to ambient to jazz... In most cases with normal rock through the 80's you'd not find that much need for gapless playback.

A perfect example of where not having gapless playback is irritating is the Sigur Rós album named Von. Numerous tracks on it flow together. Right offhand I can't remember which track it is but the transition from one track to another takes place about 5-10 seconds into the next track. Even if I am not "actively" listening it catches your attention because of the wrongness of the sound.

Another thing mentioned was the lack of hardware support in players for gapless playbacl. Just because manufacturers don't release products that support gapless playback doesn't mean it doesn't have its place or that those manufacturers are even correct in ignoring it.

I, for one, would appreciate the ability to selectively make use of gapless playback depending on the type of music/album I was listening to.

Just my worthless few cents.

rotjong

In my defense, it's my wife that likes her. Personally I find her... erm, tolerable would be as good a word as any.

I finally gave up on waiting for Apple to make the iPod gapless. I ditched my iPod for a new Karma. I wish I had just bought the Karma to begin with. It's a shame Apple can muscle their way into the market with an inferior product because they have so much money for marketing. But that's life :-(

It's also a shame that Rio has discontinued the Karma. Does anyone know if they're planning on releasing a new similar player (hopefully with a larger HD)? I might buy another one so it will last me until the rest of the audio player market catches up...

You try listening to Crimson 2 by Edge of Sanity, or some Diabolical Masquerade (or any concept album for that matter) with that tenth of a second gap, and it will kill it. (especially when stuff is broken up into movements)