I've recently been trying to rip a disc I got as a gift to MP3 using EAC/LAME (EAC .99 Prebeta 3, LAME 3.97) - the specific album is Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone - between tracks 1 and 2, there is a transition - meant to be gapless. Now, if I play this disc on WMP, it sounds fine. However, if I rip an MP3 using LAME, my Zune software or even WMP itself, the end of track 1 has some noise at the end, and does not play gapless. Same for the playing it with my Zune software.

These same MP3s play fine using the media player that comes with Nero, Creative's Mediasource and Winamp 5. If I rip the CD to WMA however, my Zune software and WMP can both play the audio fine. My question is: is this just WMP's MP3 decoder being faulty, or is there some option I should be using when ripping this CD to make it work OK with WMP? (also worth noting, while my new Zune MP3 player is not gapless, it does not have any noise at the end of the MP3 when it plays it)

The options I use for LAME are:


I've tried options in EAC such as having the leading track silence, to no avail.

Thanks in advance,
RA

The original specification for the mp3 format does not lend itself to gapless playback. Over the years unofficial enhancements have been added to facilitate this, but not every application is compatible with it. WMA, on the other hand, has always been able to be played back gaplessly.

Encoding using a recent enough LAME adds a tag which tells a decoder that knows what to look for how many samples to ignore at the end of the file allowing gapless playback with a suitable decoder.

Unfortunately the Windows Media Player decoder does not look for this tag and MS has no incentive to add support for it as the want to push their own proprietary WMA format.

The original poster will have to either use a better player like Foobar, Winamp, iTunes etc. or be stuck with WMP and WMA. My advice to the OP is to sell the Zune and buy an iPod. The current iPods and iTunes versions can play both AAC and MP3 gaplessly. iTunes even converts the LAME format gapless tag information into the Apple format that the iPod is expecting during synching operations.

Ahh, ok - I did not know that WMP was lacking here - I assumed that there was no issue with the MP3 format.

As for the Zune player itself - well, I had an iPod, and my Zune is replacing it - but I won't turn this into a Zune vs iPod thread; my Zune does not have any of the noise at the end of it like WMP does - it just isn't gapless.

I've moved over to using Winamp for my PC playback.

Thanks for the help.