Hello,

this is my first posting to this forum after spending some time reading through many threads over the last couple of days. Some things have become clearer for me, but I now have many new questions about things I wasn't even aware of a week before.

My main question is, can I play a bunch of mp3 files ripped with dbpowerAMP Reference in WinAmp v2.x so that it sounds like the original album when played in the cd player (and what settings / preconditions must be used to achieve this)?

I'm just in the process of setting up my tool environment, but so far I've set for the following:

Every disc will be ripped twice, once with EAC to get the WAV image along with a CUE Sheet, and another time with dbpowerAMP Reference R12.1 & AccurateRip for the individual tracks. The images are going to be compressed with Flac or WavePack (not sure which one to go for) and burnt to DVD-R for the archives. I want to keep the CUE Sheet with the MP3 files on hard disk and build up a music library (probably using MediaMonkey or Helium). I'm using Winamp 2.x for a couple of years and would like to avoid having to switch to foobar if it ain't necessary for some reason.

Please note that my initial question is not just about gapless playback - can do that today using in_mpg123.dll Winamp plugin. What I want is the "authentic" play mode for Winamp 2, i.e. I want the gaps to be played as long as they have been originally on the CD, just if I were playing the image file and not individual tracks. Is this feasible?

Perhaps this question is stupid anyway due to do my limited understanding of the technology. As I currently understand it, the CUE is an index into the Image. It is normally not needed for individual tracks. On the other hand, the gap information is no longer available then.

So my question above breaks down to some basic questions:

- How does dbpowerAMP Reference R12.1 handle the gaps? Does it simply delete them or are they appended to the previous track (or put before the next track)? I can't find any option setting for this in the program.

- If the gaps are kept somehow, could one generate the (encoded representation of the) image just by concatening all the individual MP3 tracks, i.e. some sort of COPY /R?

- If the gaps are not kept (or if I simply want to override the default behaviour), can I use the existing CUE sheet to tell the Player how (long) to play a gap?

- Is there a tool that can convert a CUE sheet indexing a single image file to one that indexes multiple files?

Basically, I want to be able to remove leading and trailing silence from tracks by default but I still want to be able to play them as if the silence was still there. Hope this is not too confusing.

Thanks for taking the time reading up to here.