First of all, thank you all for your help in my previous posts. All my questions have been answered for which I am extremely appreciative.

In doing a search, I have read in other posts about how gapless mp3's can be played if the hardware supports it but assuming my hardware does not support it (A Kenwood car cd receiver), is there a way to play or create a string of mp3s such as a live album that can be played consecutively without a gap in between the tracks?

The only way on typical non-gapless hardware is to encode any group of contiguous tracks as a single MP3. This will have silences at each end where they don't matter and will not allow shuffle play of those tracks.

Thank you for your reply. I was afraid of that. I'll have to dig deep into the Kenwood manual and see if my head unit will support it but certainly not be default. Makes listening to live albums and albums like Pink Floyd's The Wall a bit of a bummer.

yeah, you're probably out of luck on this. I don't think it's very common for car-cd players (that read mp3 discs) to support gapless mp3 playback.

as I understand it, there are two necessary factors to get gapless mp3 playback
1) the player must load the beginning of the next file-to-be-played into buffer until the current file-being-played ends
2) mp3 as a format is not natively gapless (whereas ogg vorbis, for example, is) but instead has some silence at the beginning and end of the file. The silence at the beginning is standardized by encoder (576 samples for LAME, 528 for iTunes, 672 for Fgh which is used by Windows Media Player) while amount of silence at the end can vary. There are various methods for leaving out these silent blocks - LAME-encoded mp3's have metadata in the mp3 header for the number of samples to leave off at the beginning and end of the file. Foobar2000 reads this data, but most programs don't. Alternately, iTunes scans the file for amount of silence and builds some sort of database info about it.