I'm having a small problem concerning my lossy audio collection here: For PC playback I'm using -q2 aoTuV beta 5 files, my flash-based portable Vorbis player is currently fed by -q1 encodings with album ReplayGain irreversibly applied to the audio data via foobar's converter. A third collection had to be created for my mobile phone (512 MB flash-storage, just like the portable player) using Nero AAC -q 0.31, since it doesn't work with the Vorbis codec. Besides, these two devices both don't read ReplayGain tags and they aren't supported by the Rockbox firmware.

As you can see here, I'm wasting lots of space for these three lossy archives. Currently I'm running a bit short of it and don't want to invest in a further drive yet, i.e. at least one of these collections has to be deleted soon. The problem about this matter: I neither want to go without ReplayGain on the portables nor do I want to irreversibly apply the gain to the files used for PC playback, hence a -q2 Vorbis archive with foobar's permanent ReplayGain adjustment isn't an option.

For this reason I decided transcoding my complete FLAC archive to Nero -q 0.34 instead. Its quality sounds transparent to my ears, and applying the gain via aacgain has proven being a reliable reversible change which, of course, also works in conjunction with the mobile phone. In theory this approach to get rid of the problem allows me to use the Nero encodings for both PC and mobile playback, making one of the collections unnecessary. But as we all know, theory doesn't always prove to be assignable to practice.

At least in this case I'm having trouble getting the Nero files to be played back gaplessly by both Amarok and Winamp, my two favourite software players. Foobar seems to be the only one to be able to read Nero's gapless info, hence I downloaded iTunes and made it scan the files, it plays them back gaplessly as well now. Problem is, Winamp still leaves gaps during transition, despite this feature which was implemented in the 5.3 update:

Improved: [in_mp3/in_mp4] itunes-compatible gapless playback

Well, and that leads me to my actual question: Does anyone know how to fix this issue without having to go for simple crossfading in both players instead? Like some alternative Winamp MP4/AAC plug-in or an update to Amarok's xine engine?