I got Iron Maiden's 'Real Live' & 'Real Dead'. 4 CD's.
They are LIVE. As always I am going to use EAC and LAME aps -Z.
But never did it with live albums.
As I understand I have to detect gaps and turn on 'leave out gaps'?
Is it all I have to do?
Thanks.

You shouldn't rip them any different than you do with normal albums.
But you'll get problems with gapless playback due to short-commings of the mp3 format.

de Mon:

As JanS said, rip them like you would normal albums. But (even though it's not a good idea even with "normal" albums), be absolutely certain NOT to normalize the files, or you'll get ugly volume differences at track junctions.

Also, you should use a gapless plugin to be able to playback your albums seemlessly (for Winamp / for foobar2000).

If you encode with MusePack the playback of the separated tracks will be gapless.

Thank you all for your replies.
1. I am going to listen them on my SlimX. I don't use PC for playback, so on MPC is also out for me.
2. What can you say about 'encoder offset' in EAC. Doesn't it solve the problem? Anybody used it?

There's always the --nogap feature and MusiCutter... Give it a try, I'd say...

Remember that the --nogap functions is experiment and can have some nasty bugs.


no. It wouldn't solve the problem.

Simplest solution - although by far the least elegant - is to encode each disc of a live album as a single MP3 stream. You lose the ability to jump to any individual track, but if you are concerned about maintaining the integrity of transitions it's probably the most foolproof approach.

- M.

Although I haven't experienced any problems wiht the --nogap switch yet, I still think MusiCutter will do the job:

Rip as one big WAV -> compress to MP3
Make a cuesheet of the CD and let MusiCutter split the large MP3 into chunks...

I think you would be better off recording as one large mp3 - in EAC use the create image and cue sheet and encode to mp3.

The gaps in albums are not neccesarily silence, especially with live albums, so if you remove the gaps you are possibly deleteing some part of the show, even if it is just clapping or background noise and just for 1 sec or less. It depends if this is important for you.

Personally I like to have the entire album and cue sheet and then you can seek the tracks you want with the cue sheet. I've listen to some live albums that I've burned from individual tracks that origianally came from a live album and it is a little annoyning having those little jumps between the tracks. Not the end of the world but given the choice I prefer to have a one file album with cue sheet.

Edit - just read that you want them on the mp3 player - you should probably break it up into individual tracks then unless you want to seek through the whole mp3. You can use musicutter with the cue sheet to break up the CD image.

Edit2 - use the create image & cue sheet -> compressed and then use Lame to get the mp3 file
@Guillaume - You'll have to give me time to actually read the question I'm already giving the answer to

Doesn't have cue support, for all I know...

Or look on http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org/mp3.html and find Lame 3.90.3 with APE and Cuesheet support (or get the 3.90.2 version from Nyaochi's site where you'll find the instructions)

With APE support you can optionally first rip to a single lossless Monkey's Audio (.APE) file with CUE sheet in EAC, then use this special Lame-with-cuesheet to encode into individual MP3 files from the commandline (one command per album).

The good thing is it can tag the files and name them too.

By default it will add the Xing/Lame VBR header frame to your APS files (unlike --nogap), which helps seeking and correct track length display. However, this causes problems with most decoders (doubtless including your SlimX, but try it), as they treat the Xing/Lame VBR header frame as a frame they should play (albeit silent), so reintroducing the gap.

To overcome this and remain VBR, you HAVE to give up the correct seeking and track-length display (but the files will play just fine) by adding the -t switch:

For .WAV CD image:


For .APE CD image (referenced in .CUE):


You can specify a naming rule too, e.g.:

would generate 01-Track Name-Artist Name.mp3

That's the form of command for Nyaochi's version and the Rarewares version called 3.90.3modified (which allows the use of --preset as a synonym for --alt-preset). For the unmodified 3.90.3, use --alt-preset instead.

(Incidentally, --preset medium and --preset fast medium are included in the 3.90.3modified version if you need lower bitrate for a portable)

This seems to work remarkably well, but making MP3 play gaplessly will always be a dirty hack of some sort.

Musicutter also seems to work very well, and it also damages the seeking info. It will also destroy the bit reservoir where the MP3 is cut, so might be marginally worse than Lame with cuesheet input and -t.

You can restore the accurate seeking info with repair tools like MP3/TagStudio, but again, you'll break the gapless playback in most players.

To get seeking and gapless playback with MP3 to work, you need to either go for CBR or ABR (and ABR might require the bitrate of the first frame to match the average bitrate, depending how the encoder guesses how far to seek when there's no VBR header frame). Perhaps --alt-preset cbr 224 or --alt-preset cbr 256 would maintain acceptable quality without the excessive bitrate bloat of 320kbps CBR --alt-preset insane. You can put the balance where you want.

Incidentally, MP2 (either left or renamed to MP3) will play in most/all MP3 players but aren't gapless either.

Also, you can happily use mp3gain providing you stick to Album Gain (which I use anyway).

A lot of good info, but from what I know, MusiCutter does exactly the same as --nogap: MusiCutter cuts between the nearest frames on the time mark presented in the cue file. Nevertheless it leaves the VBR header in place in the first file, so it should either be removed or remade to give the right time and seeking info for the first track. The --nogap feature just fills the last frame with a bit of info from the next track to completely fill it up.

Guillaume, I'd agree, except that I think that musiCutter destroys the bit reservoir carry-over into the next file, so might slightly damage the quality of the start of the next track (probably barely noticeable though). Lame --nogap mode, for VBR, will presumably not expect the reservoir to be carried into the next file, and will therefore allocate at least enough bits to the first frame of the new file, with any left over being used as reservoir for the following frames.

Good spot about the VBR info being wrong for the first file after musiCutter gets to work.

I used --nogap with APS -z using 3.90.2 and every wav resulted in 2 mp3s:
track01-08.mp3 (the track itsself)
track01-08.mp3.mp3 (very small and contains white noise)
What the hell is *.mp3.mp3???

complete commandline please... (you should also define the --nogapout)

Hell! I must be stupid but it doesn't work with RazorLame. I just added --nogapout
1. ap standard -Z --nogap --nogapout
1. ap standard -Z --nogapout
1 and 2 doesn't work!

That's because all files have to be in just one commandline, RazorLame lets Lame encode them from seperate commands (files one by one). As I said, use all2lame for proper use of this (experimental!) --nogap switch (if you want to use a frontend). Have a look at the lame --longhelp for more info on the switches --nogap and --nogapout.