...or transition more quickly than the original mastering.

No, he's not saying that, and yes it is possible for Lame MP3 to be truly gapless.

From the wiki:

That means Lame MP3 cannot be truly gapless because of MP3 format itself. Lame MP3 can be gapless (using metadata/tags, shown with iTunes7 and new iPods), but I guess techincally it is not true gapless since the format is not gapless.

With software that is able to use the information stored in the lame header, decoding (and hence playback) can be 100% gapless.

Just because the format isn't technically gapless then, as previously said, does not mean it cannot be played back gaplessly through the use of meta-data.

The MP3 format is not inherently gapless, that is correct. Without a decoder which accounts for encoder delay/padding, songs are not exactly the same length as the original tracks. AFAIK, this is the case with most (or all?) lossy codecs.

This assumes that the file is not a LAME MP3 and that the decoder does not support ''gapless decoding''. No?

Something else seems unclear in that wiki article. AFAIK, Ogg Vorbis (and AAC?) works the same way. It's just that, unlike the case of MP3, there are provisions in the original specifications for gapless metadata to be added during encoding (which is not to say that the files are encoded without padding / gaps). Or am I mistaken?

Right. Most modern music codecs are not gapless by themselves (mp1,mp2,mp3,aac, Vorbis, mpc, wma,...). However, some of them are USUALLY found in CONTAINERS allowing to store the gapless info.
So once again, Vorbis or AAC are not more gapless than MP3.

If you still want to use EAC, you can extract to individual wavs and then encode them in itunes to aac or mp3. I've been doing this and have had perfect gapless on 12 different discs.

Yeah, I know they said that but I thought I would try anyway. Kinda annoying that they did this since there seems to be little reason why they couldn't other than forcing people like myself to buy new iPod sooner. Also, it seems that the gapless tag is not added when the file is uploaded by iTunes onto my 4G. It could be that they don't add this information into the database for iPods older than 5G. Perhaps someone will figure out how the gapless tag works and it will be possible to give your files this tag with foo_dop. The software on my 4G iPod may be able to playback gaplessly but without the proper information it obviously can't.

Why would Apple update the player firmware but not allow you to update the file metadata?


If Apple is just being greedy, would they really expect that this (alleged) info will not surface? If anyone can prove it, it certainly would give Apple a lot of bad press. It doesn't seem very likely, but I guess it's not beyond belief.

Directly using the portalPlayer chip, it might be possible that it is NOT possible to do gapless playback. Gapless playback needs you to access the audio data after decoding but before it is sent to the DAC. There are several integrated decoding/dac chips where this is just not possible.

But this begs the question (or reveals my ignorance?)...

If older iPods are gapless with rockbox, wouldn't that suggest that the hardware IS capable?

What do you think kincaid?

No. RockBox is doing a full software decoding, thus reducing battery life. In (previous) iPods there is a chip dedicated to decoding, and this chip is not used by RockBox.

Now, in the 5G it might be possible that everything is handled on the ARM, including decoding. (but this is pure speculation from me)

heh, it looks like this is the death of foobar for me

oh well, thanks for the memories foobar

I wouldn't quit foobar just yet. Somehow I think foo_dop will find a way to upload tracks to the iPod without messing with the gapless info.

And foobar does so much more things (for example, transcoding my FLACs to MP3 and making them all the same volume!)

I don't know if anyone else posted this in this thread yet, but I just got a reply on WinAmp's Discussion forum @ winamp.com that WinAmp will be supporting iTunes/iPod encoded Gapless playback (for both MP3 and AAC/M4A files) in the soon to be released version 5.25 of WinAmp. They already have the iTunes compatible Gapless supporting code added to WinAmp the devs said.

See the thread for more at: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=...992#post2030992

Does anyone find this somewhat ironic?

Not quite sure what you meant by this... perhaps you meant I should re-read the whole thread again. I seem to remember someone's post saying WinAmp will probably add iTunes compatible Gapless playback, but now I know for sure that WinAmp devs have definately added Gapless support for iTunes encoded files. This thread I started has sure grown into a massive one -- that's for sure -- with 216 posts and 19301 views. It's hard to read this one from scratch (let alone remember what everyone said in the posts that I previously read days ago).

I'd say pragmatic. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Because of this, Winamp will not only play LAME MP3's gapless (which it already did) but non-LAME MP3's as well. Or practically gapless in the latter case.

Don't take it personally goodnews, the comment wasn't directed at you.

I see no reason why Winamp (or foobar2000 for that matter) couldn't easily and quickly support the new tag data and correctly write this information to the library on the iPod.

What I find ironic is that Winamp will still not be able to support gapless playback natively. I also doubt that Winamp will be doing any scanning for gaps in tracks like iTunes does.

Though I hope I'm wrong!

EDIT: Italics added, "gaps in" added for clarity

Winamp has supported gapless playback natively since 5.2

Winamp has had native gapless support for quite a while now. It is based on the same MP3info header all serious gapless implementations (i.e. not the crossfade crap) use. It does of course only work on LAME MP3's.

Check this thread. I'm not quite sure what to make of it but it appears they do some sort of scan...

Edit: Ah, I'm sure benski can enlighten us...

That scan is for songs already on your iPod before the upgrade. There is no iTunes-style "guessing" scan. We hope that Winamp users are sane enough to have been using LAME to encode their MP3s.

Thanks. It makes sense, especially since since the method of the 'iTunes scan' is still a huge black box as far as I know.

I'm glad to be wrong!

Thanks guys.

I think I may have good news for those of you who haven't been able to get the promised gapless audio playback on your iPod after installing iTunes 7 and letting it go through your songs to determine gapless playback. After iTunes kept kicking my iPod off I was at a loss about what to do next. I am happy to say I got it to work today. It's a bit of a dirty way to do it, but it works! I found this post on ipodwizard.net by Kaneda:

1. iTunes seems to say that your iPod is up to date, if there isn't an update file on your computer. I.e., it won't actually check on the internet. However, it also seems it will check for iPod updates when it checks for iTunes updates, so try to click Help/Check for Updates in the menu. Then iTunes should tell you there's an update for you iPod - download and continue...

2. Seems that iTunes somehow fails to connect to the iPod in some cases, when doing an update - like it "forgets" it's actually there. The iPod will go the menu screen (or Charging display), iTunes will keep saying "updating iPod", and after a while it will give an error 1417 or 1418, depending on whether you chose Update or Restore. What worked for me: Click Update, then when the "indeterminate progress bar" starts in iTunes, pull out the iPod from the dock and put it back in. After that forceful re-recognition of the iPod, the update started (took only 5 seconds or so to complete). Everything works. But do this at your own risk - if the iPod has actually started updating when you pull out, there's a chance you'll be in big trouble

It took my iPod a bit longer to update, but once I did, I selected "The Who Sell Out" for gapless playback and it works seamlessly. The only problem I've had is that even though iTunes spent a good hour scanning all 10K+ of my songs, it didn't turn on the feature for any of my albums. However, if I manually select an album on my iPod, it will update it and it will play gapless. This is a major PITA given the amount of songs I have, but at least many of my albums will play right!

I hope everyone has as good of luck with this I did!

To me, this is the best update Apple has done to its iPod + iTunes line. Pretty much gives everything what everyone has been asking for plus more. I like the end of the event where Steve Jobs shows where Apple is going with iTV. Using iTunes to play music, movies, tv shows and podcasts on your computer or television or in your pocket or in your car. That is exactly what I want, to have everything on a central point (server) and control everything from there.

This is something a lot of companies don't seem to have exploited. Apple knows what the consumer wants and they do it well, to the point and simply, even though some of their products are slightly overpriced for some. However, prices are falling quite rapidly. $349 for an 80GB iPod is a bargain in my opinion, considering my 60GB photo was £320!

Still going to be sticking with foobar2000 and Video LAN Player as my music and video player respectively, but if Apple keeps these significant updates then I may be forced to go back to iTunes full-time instead of just for updating my iPod.

Speaking of iTunes. At university I was on my girlfriends computer in the halls and you could see all the people who had their music shared on the campus. Some of the music was pretty good and took my fancy. Anyone know anyway of copying their music to my computer? Or does iTunes prevent this?

Thanks.

This news definitely has me leaning towards replacing the Rio Karma, which I bought specifically for it's gapless playback and audio quality, with an 80GB iPod. To get my entire music collection onto my Karma (the wife has one too) requires Vorbis (which has a higher impact on battery life than mp3 or wma) at 80kbps or lower, and this is obviously starting to become a problem. Even she has started to notice that some songs sound odd, and she's not into encoding, bitrates, or any of that stuff at all. Would be nice if AAC-HE support was added too, particularly in light of that recent 64kbps test, though with 80GB I guess it wouldn't be a priority for us for quite a while. That is unless we start using video a lot, which I could see happening. Sure am glad we've held off on the whole iPod craze for as long as we have actually, because it's sure going to be nice to get one at this point now that the product has matured so much. That and the fact that iPod's have so much third party support are truly making it hard to resist any longer.

So would I be correct in summarizing this thread to the following?

• iPod 5G and Nano support gapless playback. 4G may or may not depending on who you talk to. 3G and below, and Mini, do not.
• Codecs known to work include, at least: iTunes AAC, iTunes ALAC, LAME MP3.
• Codecs known not to work include Nero AAC and virtually all other MP3 codecs.
• If your configuration does not support gapless playback for whatever reason, you will perceive a very small gap (on the order of tens of milliseconds) between tracks.
• Music file uploads must occur through iTunes for gapless playback to be preserved on the iPod. (foo_dop in particular does not work yet.)
• The Gapless flag on each track in iTunes does not have anything to do with iPod gapless support; it is a way to short-circuit crossfade playback in iTunes.

They still will be perceptually/near gapless. Nero AAC native gapless info is not used and non-LAME MP3 have no native gapless info. However, they will sound practically gapless because iTunes uses its own 'magic scanning routine' with surprisingly good results.

'Not work' is a bit too harsh.


The next version of Winamp (5.25) is supposed to support 'gapless uploads' to iPods.


Good summary by the way! I was thinking of doing something like this but you seem to have covered it well, apart from my two minor comments.

I'm going to make a new post with the summary, with the hopes that the mods will sticky it.

EDIT: New thread.

Yes, Rockbox is doing a full software decoding, but so is the Apple firmware - none of the ipods have a dedicated audio decoding chip. They all just contain a simple DAC which is fed PCM data via i2s from the CPU.

If you want more info on the hardware in the ipods, the ipodlinux wiki has a nice breakdown of every ipod going back to the first generation devices, as well as links to documentation describing the functionality of those chips:

http://ipodlinux.org/Generations

Rockbox's poor power management (we have almost no hardware documentation to help us) and relatively unoptimised code (ARM CPUs are a new target for Rockbox) are the main reasons for the reduced battery life compared to Apple's firmware.

On other players (e.g. iriver H120/40, H320/40), Rockbox uses less power than the manufacturer's original firmware, and still manages gapless playback.

Great summary, but I disagree about other mp3 codecs "don't work". I have many old mp3's done with the Fhg codec from MusicMatch 7.5 and I at least perceive these as Gapless from listening (through headphones trying to locate any gap and even watching the ipod for timing). So I'd say gapless "works" on these mp3's. I admit I haven't tested in any technical way to establish this, just the listening....

I'm using windows media player 11 beta (and happy enough) but due to nasty gaps it puts on any burns I use itunes to convert wma lossless to wav etc...

For compelations I just use WMP as I don't mind the gaps then.

Most annoyed when installing itunes 7 and all it's glorious gapless newness, it seems to have knocked out wmp's ability to see my CD-R/DVD-R drive as anything but a playback device.

I upgraded to wmp 11 beta2 hoping that may reset stuff...

Any ideas?

Thanks for correction.
So if Portal Player's chips are only a pair of ARMs with some I/O and controllers, obviously Apple could provide gapless support to older iPods.

What does any of this have to do with gapless playback in iPods?

I love the new Itunes 7.0. However, I've tried everything with my 4g 40 gb ipod photo, and I don't get gapless on the ipod. I use MP3s exclusively. I ripped Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon with Itunes 7 (MP3-VBR), made sure my ipod was as up to date as possible, marked the tracks as part of a gapless album, and still don't get gapless.

Gapless works fine on the computer. Very nice.

You need a 5G ipod.

QUOTE

Codecs known not to work include Nero AAC

@ivan or @menno: will this be addressed?

QUOTE(Digisurfer @ Sep 20 2006, 15:07)

This news definitely has me leaning towards replacing the Rio Karma, which I bought specifically for it's gapless playback and audio quality, with an 80GB iPod. To get my entire music collection onto my Karma (the wife has one too) requires Vorbis (which has a higher impact on battery life than mp3 or wma) at 80kbps or lower, and this is obviously starting to become a problem. Even she has started to notice that some songs sound odd, and she's not into encoding, bitrates, or any of that stuff at all. Would be nice if AAC-HE support was added too, particularly in light of that recent 64kbps test, though with 80GB I guess it wouldn't be a priority for us for quite a while. That is unless we start using video a lot, which I could see happening. Sure am glad we've held off on the whole iPod craze for as long as we have actually, because it's sure going to be nice to get one at this point now that the product has matured so much. That and the fact that iPod's have so much third party support are truly making it hard to resist any longer.

Having always disliked the iPod concept, I still found myself inside the local apple store yesterday, buying the black 8GB Nano. After trying it, all initial regrets were gone.

Personally, I would think twice before buying the 80GB iPod. Compared to the nano, it's bulky and heavy, has a mechanical HD, and battery capacity is 14 vs. 24 hours. (My main use is for running). Yes you can put your complete CD collection on it as lossy compressed files, but you'll still need a lossless backup. I find it more convenient to get the 8GB Nano and a 250GB external HD for lossless files. Together it's less than $349, which is what you'd pay for the 80GB ipod. You can put your favorite 200 albums on the nano, while having the lossless backup elsewhere.

Would you really watch many full movies and TV shows on such a tiny screen? I know I wouldn't. The nano can do photo slideshows of my 8 months old kid. That's good enough for me.

PS: iTunes is basically a nice piece of software, but it need to be optimized. E.g. I simply can't stand that *two* memory hogging processes (iPodService.exe and iTunesHelper.exe) are running at all times (even when iTunes is closed). Too bad. Will have to wait for Winamp 5.25.

Sorry for the second time I ask, but does anyone know if the stuttering problem is still a problem!? Or is there a new firmware version available for mini 2g?
I can't test it myself at this time, but it's the most important thing for me. And yes, I think it's more important than gapless playback. 10-15% of my songs are stuttering - what a disaster.

This is a little OT -- but I watched entire season of "Battlestar Galactica" on my iPod. Or better said, VIA my iPod on a 25" TV screen. The video out capabilities of the 80gb unit are nothing to be sneezed at... it does automatic PAL/NTSC conversion on the fly, too.

Not that your stated reasons for preferring the Nano aren't perfectly reasonable, esp. if you're a runner...

Way off topic, but Apple will probably never fix this. It was fixed on nano (1G) earlier this year, but it was still a "current" product at that time. mini (of any generation) is long retired. Apple can prove me wrong, of course.

The shuttering issue has definitely been fixed with the last 2 versions of the Nano firmware.

However, us Mini owners are apparently left behind.

I am seriously considering getting a 2G Nano though. Gapless playback, no shuttering issues, and the ability to use this while running really have me interested to say the least.

I tried iTunes7's MP3 encoder, 128kbps VBR highest quality, and it's gapless. However, the encoded MP3s are not gapless with foobar.

Lame's the only encoder that can produce true gapless MP3 files for foobar. That iPods can play non-Lame MP3s gaplessly is pretty cool in and of itself.

That being said, iTunes' native MP3 encoder is still crap (esp. in VBR mode):
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/mp3-128/results.html

So just because it can play back gaplessly on iPod doesn't mean one should do so

That was done in 2004. We're in 2006. That test used iTunes4.2, we're at version 7 now. Any ABX comparison between both versions? How do you know iTunes7's MP3 encoder is "still crap"? Is quoting old listening tests the acceptable TOS now in HA?

Do you know of any more recent tests? If iTunes has improved its MP3 encoder since then, then I stand corrected.

It should be pointed out which bitrate was used for that test:

Sebastian Mares is planning on giving the codec a more fair shake this time around.

Ok, my bad -- I took conventional wisdom as fact.

Just a note for people thinking about getting one of the new iPods. Although they play perfectly gapless with Lame VBR encoded material, at least in the Nano, there is a firmware bug (v1.0.1) which makes it impossble to search within long tracks (more than 5-6 minutes). E.g to get to the end of the the first track in 'Wish You Were Here' (13:30 mins), can only be done by playing through it. Hopefully Apple will fix it in the next firmware update, but I guess mp3 VBR isn't their number one priority. Read more about it here.

I've just split an mp3/cue with pcutmp3 and found that it plays gapless in foobar2k but not on itunes 7 or the ipod 5G 80gb.

My understanding is that both itunes 7 (ipod) and foobar2k use the lame tag for the gapless info, so why is it gapless in foobar2k and not on the Ipod (itunes 7)?