I was give some MP3s, and I noticed, especially with live albums, there are 2 second gaps between the songs. I guessing the tracks were not ripped correctly. My question is there any piece of software that will detect these gaps? It's obvious with live albums, but studio albums not so much. Also is it possible to remove these gaps once they have been detected?

I'll put money on that mp3's (or other source) were burned onto a CD with default gap-settings (2 sec) and then ripped.

If you want to reencode, there are plenty of DSP's that will remove silence. foobar2000 has one built in, and Winamp should be able to do it as well.

Maybe it's possible to tweak the files to think there's no silence by messing with lame header settings, but I haven't tried such thing myself.

I don't know about "detecting" the gaps, but there are programs such as MP3DirectCut (FREE!!!) that you can use to manually (and losslessly) chop-out the silence. It shouldn't be that hard to find and edit 15 or 20 gaps in a "concert". (You still need a "gapless" player to play the live files without gaps.)

Any audio editor* can cut & splice audio files, but most audio editors will decode and then re-encode the MP3, which can result in quality loss. The usual advice is to avoid editing lossy formats, or use one of the (limited function) special MP3 editors if possible.

When I rip regular (studio) CDs, I rip to individual files. When I rip live albums, I rip it as one big WAV file. Then, I actually make 2 copies. I make one big "concert MP3", and then (with my audio editor) I make separate copies of all of the songs with the applause/croud noise faded in-and-out. Quite often, I'll "borrow" some applause from one song and use it on another if the fade-in or fade-out is too short, or if it just doesn't "sound right". (I do all of the editing in WAV format, and compress to MP3 as the last step after all editing is done.)


* If you don't have an audio editor and you want to play around with this stuff, Audacity is FREE!!!

I have a new iPod classic, which capable of gapless playback



Yup looks like some have and some have been ripped gapless.




I've been looking at the wave graph of my songs in Audacity, and if there is any sound activity in the last 2 seconds then I'm guessing the album was ripped gapless. Otherwise it may or may not have been ripped with a 2 second gap.

With live albums it's obvious if the album is gapless or not, others are not. Pink Floyd albums are easy to distinguish, other albums just have one or two track which need to be gapless. Like first 2 tracks of The Alan Parsons Project - Eye In The Sky, or the first 2 track of The Beatles - White Album, or the first 2 track or Steve Miller Band - Fly Like An Eagle. There are probably others, hence why I would like to know which albums are ripped properly.

Thanks for everyone's input.

Just to make it clear, I doubt (unless i misunderstand something) that the 2 sec gaps are created during "ripping".

Gaps during ripping usually only happen for one reason and they are NOT 2 sec.*

As I mentioned, 2 sec gaps are more than often a default setting of burning redbook CD's with i.e. Nero. When you create an "Audio CD" and adds tracks they are appended with 2 sec gaps if you don't manually change this. That leads me to the question: What are your source and are you ripping this yourself?



* The mp3 standard itself did not take gapless playback into account and many common mp3-encoders may therefore create *small* gaps when played. LAME encoder implements a header that (if the player supports it) will create a smooth transition with no gaps between files. However, this is just for information beacuse I'm very sure this does not have anything to do with your problem.