I was testing out the new gapless playback support for the "old" 5G iPod (you get this with upgrading to iTunes 7 and then letting iTunes upgrade the iPod firmware to version 1.2).

Results:
- When I import a CD anew with iTunes (to format AAC), I get perfect gapless playback on the iPod (as far as I can hear).
- When I import the CD with EAC / Nero AAC encoder (1.002) and then load the files via iTunes to my iPod, the playback is almost, but not entirely, gapless. It's easy to tell where the track boundaries are, since there seems to be a few milliseconds of silence in-between.

Does anyone have an idea as to why "perfect" gapless playback on an iPod doesn't seem to be possible with the Nero AAC encoder?

Thanks! Martin

You should find comments and basically, that what you say is true in this thread :

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=48231&hl=

It is not a flaw in the nero encoder. It is a non-feature of the iTunes 7/iPod. Basically, it is using its own tags to identify correctly the gap and skip it. Creating a file with iTunes does add this information (Because it is available at the time of creation), in Nero, it just can guess it, and it seems it either doesn't do it, or does a bad guessing.
For LAME mp3 files, there are reports by users that its gapless information is recognized by iTunes. Seems that it is in iPod too, but i can't assert that.

Does this imply that I can never have perfect gapless if I do a track by track rip and then encoding (such as EAC does)? Does this also imply that I can't rip a gapless CD track by track to a lossless format (e.g. flac), and later encode to say AAC and still get "perfect" gapless playback? Because in both cases the "time of creation" is long past.

Or is it - in the end - a matter of reverse-engineering the iTunes private tags for gapless and adding them to the Nero encoder (or tagger)? If so I would of course like to see this happen sooner or later .

It's not only that I trust the Nero encoder more than the Apple one, it is also that I trust EAC (plus AccurateRip) much more than iTunes.

Thanks! Martin

P.S. If I use plain EAC/Lame track by track (i.e. none of the gapless features of Lame, since they don't work in track by track mode) I get - as far as I can hear - perfect gapless playback on my iPod (I didn't test iTunes).

flac files are lossless, which implies it reconstructs the data as it was when it was input, exactly. If the cd is ripped correctly, there's no difference between cd -> flac -> other and cd -> other. So yes, you can have gapless even if encoded to flac first.

hopefully, the problem with iTunes gapless tags will be temporary, and a common method will be choosen soon.

About your experience with lame encodings... they understand the lame gapless information.

I've tried this function using foobar: I've selected a bounch of flac files and then
Convert -> Convert to album images with Cuesheets or Chapters

It works fine and it's recognized from foobar, but once importing that file into iTunes 7.0.1 it appears as a single file without any chapter. Anyway I think that's a known issue.

But the question is: how to embed album art in that file? Do you think that format is going to be implemented in some mobile device (like Sony Ericsson Walkman series)? That could be a way to gain a gapless playback with devices that don't support it natively.

Win 9x support for ver. 1.0.0.2
http://sweetlow.at.tut.by/download/neroaac_9x.zip
It will be better if Nero developers make this job, but...
Nonetheless, thanks to them for they effort in free tools creation.

Any news regarding a linux version?

404 Not Found.

A Linux version would be absolutely wonderful. OSX has Apple's encoder, Windows has Apple's and Nero, all Linux has right now is faac which kind of sucks right now.

Take it from here:
http://people.overclockers.ru/SweetLow/record4
Or use Google
~

http://sweetlow.at.tut.by/download/neroaac_9x.zip
Win 9x support.

Updated for Version 1.0.7.0 - 2007-02-12