Hi all!

Has anyone figured out what the deal is with the tags the iPod needs for gapless playback? Maybe someone created a script that adds the tags to your files?

I'm using EAC through Wine. EAC encodes to FLAC and then flac2mp3 converts the files to mp3 using lame-3.9.7. Then I put them on my iPod 5G with Amarok (linked to libgpod-0.6). When I play the "Abbey Road" Beatles album I hear the gaps in between songs.

If there was some info around about what's needed and how to gather all the necessary info I guess I could write a script to do that.

Regards
micmac

Is it possible to run iTunes on Wine?

iTunes successfully reads the LAME tag, and thus adapts the files for gapless playback both in iTunes and on iPods.

Perhaps iTunes takes the details from the LAME tag and adds it to another part of the MP3 file that iTunes and iPods can read.

I do not know about a way to do that on Linux.

Is rockbox an option? If you have a new-ish model, then it certainly isn't.

foobar will do it with the foo_dop plugin. however, even though fb2k runs fairly well under wine in general, i don't know whether or not the foo_dop plugin will work.

Rockbox is an option seeing as he says he has a 5th generation.
(Unless I am interpreting "5G" wrong and he has a 1st gen which I don't believe does the new gapless trick - but can do Rockbox.)

Hi all, thanks for taking an interest!

Yes, it's a fifth generation iPod (5G, iPod Video). I tried Rockbox but it's not for me. Well, tried it a week ago, actually. The transfer rate (PC to iPod) was horrible. Maybe they fixed that already, though. Another thing is that I've read on the Rockbox site that their firmware uses more power than the original Apple firmware.

If it's just tags shouldn't it be easy to figure out which extra tags iTunes introduces and then to find out what the values stand for?

Kind regards
micmac

OK, it's all good (already)

My iPod now plays songs without gaps, too. I checked the KDE bugzilla for bug reports/wishes partaining to iPod and gapless. I found that libgpod already knows how to add the needed tags. But amarok doesn't yet support that.

Afterwards I installed gtkpod, which is more closely linked to libgpod than amarok. I looked at the source and it seemed to support gapless already. So I deleted the Abbey Road mp3s from the iPod and added them again with gtkpod. Afterwards they played without gaps in between songs on the iPod.

All's good now

Kind regards
micmac

Considering Rockbox uses Apple firmware to transfer files it should be identical. Reboot into the primary Apple firmware instead of Emergency Disk mode if you are seeing low-speed transfers.


That has been mostly fixed. Rockbox should be using using less than 20% more power than the stock firmware on 5/5.5Gs. Far better than the 40-50% premium Rockbox was costing you only a few weeks ago. Tons better than the 80-100% premium Rockbox cost in the beginning.

I'm not trying to convince you to use Rockbox - just trying to clarify for others.

That is great. I was about to write a post about that exactly same problem and then saw that it already existed.
Since I'm now about 95% under linux I guess it will be soon more like 97%

Not working here... I'm using gtkpod to encode on the fly my flac collection and transfer it to my ipod classic (with the built-in conversion script), and I can't get it to play without gaps.

Micmac and french dok, can I ask what versions of gtkpod and libgpod you're using? (stock Ubuntu packages for me, 0.6.0 and 0.99.12)

I have gapless here too with libgpod 0.60 + gtkpod 0.99.12. But I'm not encoding on the fly.