Hi, everybody. It's my first post here.

It's a long time since I learnt to encode and decode digital audio and how to work with it.
Now I have a simple question:

Is it there an audio contanier that supports tracks?

For example, I always store my favourite Audio CDs in MP3 disc for backup purpose. I am a DJ, and many CDs I got are mixed (so no gaps between tracks).
As you know, MP3 (and other compressed formats) generates a small gap between tracks, so I must generate an ONE-FILE MP3 with all disc, but doing so, I can't add Title and Authors for each track and seeking between 80 min MP3 may be inprecise.

My goal is to create an ONLY FILE (compressed in MP3 or other format) that allows me to split it in tracks and for each track, writing the info.

So 1 CD ---> 1 FILE with titles, authors, info, and NO GAPS between tracks.
Is it there something like that, or does anybody working on it?

Thanks for the repyes.

YOu can use ogg vorbis or mpc instead of mp3. Those formats do not add gaps.

If your player supports reading of cue-sheets you can use cue-sheets to hold the information for each track in a large mp3 file though.

If you rip your CD's with Exact Audio Copy you can choose to Copy Image and Cuesheet using any compression format (or none), and as a bonus you can use secure ripping to guarantee the best possible rip quality (and offset correction too).

Search this forum for the word mp3splice to find threads that talk about playing back cue-sheet albums and compatibility with VBR MP3s. lame's --nogap commandline option might help you to get bit-perfect lead-in and lead-out and keep the timing as accurate as possible, and it shouldn't do any real harm if it doesn't.

To be honest, if I were doing the same, I'd either compress losslessly to FLAC or Monkey's Audio, or I'd compress with mppenc (as an external encoder) to MusePack (.MPC) format. The default 'standard' setting is excellent and nearly always perceptually transparent, usually comes out a bit smaller than lame --alt-preset standard and encodes at about twice the speed. The other advantage is that MPC is gapless and produces files with the exact same number of samples as the original, so it'll fit the exact number of 1/75s frames on the original CD.

In Winamp, you might hear a gap with MPC, but it's not really there - it's Winamp closing and reopening the Wave Out device! If you get any gapless output plugin it will work, and mp3splice is, by common consent, the very best. Alternatively use foobar2000 as your audio player.

And burn a copy of the decoder installation (such as a zip file containing mppenc.exe and mppdec.exe for .MPC files, or flac.exe for .FLAC files) to the same CD-R, so you can always decode it to a WAV file for burning to an audio CD.

Some folks here would also suggest saving some recovery information in case small areas of the CD-R get corrupted, and many would suggest obtaining the best, CD-R media, such as those manufactured by Taiyo Yuden (but branded by various companies, so you need to know how to recognise TY's CD-Rs by other clues).

Regards,
DickD

Thanks for the replyes

I think I'll try using Musepack. I downloaded it but I have never tried it