None of my DAPs support gapless playback & I am getting sick of hearing gaps on live or otherwise gapless MP3s that I have ripped from CDs. I understand that, even if I rip my CDs in an app. that supports gapless encoding, my DAPs will still apply the gap when playing the album. Is merging an album into one MP3 file a reasonable substitute for replacing my players? I am not adamant about accessing individual tracks as much as I want to her the album without added gaps between tracks. My DAPs don't support flac or ogg either. If merging is the way to go, which method is recommended?

Thanks
kev

Rather than merging or splicing, it would be easier to rip the CD as a single MP3 file. EAC can do that, and I assume other rippers can do it too. If you have enough space, you can rip an album version and a "regular" track-by-track version.

OK, Good, Thanks, that's what I can do with the CDs I have not ripped yet. Any issues merging those that are already ripped to MP3? Also, with the resulting file size of a whole album (say 100 -150 MB) are there any possible issues with a player not playing the file properly?

I'm not sure if much can be done with your existing MP3 files . . . not without compressing your MP3's even further. If transcoding from a lossy source is of no concern to you, foobar2000 will be able to convert an entire album of MP3's to a single MP3 file. Again though, this would cause the resulting file to be of lesser quality than your source files.

Personally, if money isn't an option, I think it might be easier to invest in a DAP that does support gapless playback.

Or, if there is a port for your DAP, install rockbox.

This will not produce a gapless image unless the mp3 source files contain the proper gapless information that foobar2000 is able to recognize.

As recently mentioned in a different thread, you can use a program like MP3DirectCut to append the tracks without reencoding in hopes that the result will at least sound gapless.

There's Gapless Crossfader (foo_dsp_crossfader) plugin. It can remove gaps.