Hello.

I have been recently using my Rio Karma with more albums from my collection.
I have noticed, though, that in some of those, the gapless feature is kinda flawed. The merging of the track sometimes seems to be off by some milliseconds, resulting in a transition that is everything but smooth.

Could this have something to do with the tags my MP3s have?

They have ID3v1.1 and APE2 because these are the same files I use in foobar (they play absolutely gapless there). And they also have MP3Gain Undo information.

Could this be the problem? Or maybe the LAME version? I am using the LAME 3.97 alphas.

It is, obviously, already been updated to the latest (should I say "last"?) firmware.

Or is it that the gapless feature on the Karma is not that good?

You'r mp3's might have the gaps themself and the rio karma has gaps in playback maybe you should try viewing them in a audio editor to check.

No.

I said that they do playback gaplessly in fb2K.

They are meant to be that way.

All I can think off at the top of my head is maybe try do some gapless tests with some older versions of lame.

Unlikely: The karma might do a little fade in and out on the songs to give percieved gapless playback.

I will.

But the Karma is supposed to use the same LAME tag-based decoding to achieve its gapless playback.

This is weird.

The logical thing to do in such cases would be to try and isolate the source of the problem.

1. check with freshly encoded files that have no tags
2. files with APEv2
3. files with ID3v1
4. files with APEv2 and ID3v1

What about id3v2?

I am pretty sure it would be the lame encoders, The alpha's are not for archiving they are for testing you should use either 3.90.3 or 3.96.1.


Maybe the tags are conflicting with different info?

That is what I am doing: testing.

My archives rest safely at home in FLAC format.

I have a Rio Karma. I rip my music with EAC and LAME 3.90.3. All my songs have both ID3v1 and v2 Tags.

My Karma does gapless on all of them perfectly.

The only thing I can think of is the APE2 tags. Is there a way for you to delete them and try playing the songs on the Karma?

The Karma is more efficient at gapless playback if the songs contain the LAME headers. Also, upgrade your firmware to the latest version. They have fixed the gapless playback problem in that one.

Enjoy your Karma. It is a great DAP.