iPod Gap Question - anyone out there?
I posted this as a reply in another thread, but it was older and I got no responses, so I've edited it slightly and am re-posting it. As before, any help would be appreciated...
Just got a 10GB iPod - have to say I'm digging it - love the interface, sound quality, design - thumbs up! But, the gap between songs is VERY annoying.
I have many albums like Zappa's "Apostrophe", that have numerous songs that flow together, and the gap destroys the continuity. I know you can "join" the songs as one MP3 to maintain the album spacing, but then you don't have individual song access - that makes no sense.
The crossfade feature is a decent solution, but not ideal in that it still disrupts the original flow of the album, and doesn't work on the iPod, only in iTunes. I'm very surprised that this is an issue. I usually want to hear my albums in their entirety and original glory. But that's not to say that I will never want to get to the individual songs.
As was suggested elsewhere, is this really a limitation with MP3s? Seems hard to believe that there wouldn't be a solution. I'd be interested to see if the people who claim they're hearing no gap (like maybe ALCIMEDES) could elaborate - is that only in iTunes and not on the iPod? Are you listening to the CD or mp3s. Because my CDs play fine also, just not after encoding. Or, are you using the join CD feature, cause this to me is a LAST resort option?
Just FYI - I tried numerous manual solutions - like opening the audio file and editing out the gap that was inserted during encoding - but it still puts a gap in when played in the iPod and iTunes. Also, I saw on numerous PC MP3 player sites (found during my extensive searches for a solution!) that a solution can be found by joining the tracks as one file and using "cue sheets" - essentially small text files - to determine placement of individual songs, but I an't find any refernece to them with respect to the iPod. Anyone have any insight?
Any help would be appreciated.
fish
Just got a 10GB iPod - have to say I'm digging it - love the interface, sound quality, design - thumbs up! But, the gap between songs is VERY annoying.
I have many albums like Zappa's "Apostrophe", that have numerous songs that flow together, and the gap destroys the continuity. I know you can "join" the songs as one MP3 to maintain the album spacing, but then you don't have individual song access - that makes no sense.
The crossfade feature is a decent solution, but not ideal in that it still disrupts the original flow of the album, and doesn't work on the iPod, only in iTunes. I'm very surprised that this is an issue. I usually want to hear my albums in their entirety and original glory. But that's not to say that I will never want to get to the individual songs.
As was suggested elsewhere, is this really a limitation with MP3s? Seems hard to believe that there wouldn't be a solution. I'd be interested to see if the people who claim they're hearing no gap (like maybe ALCIMEDES) could elaborate - is that only in iTunes and not on the iPod? Are you listening to the CD or mp3s. Because my CDs play fine also, just not after encoding. Or, are you using the join CD feature, cause this to me is a LAST resort option?
Just FYI - I tried numerous manual solutions - like opening the audio file and editing out the gap that was inserted during encoding - but it still puts a gap in when played in the iPod and iTunes. Also, I saw on numerous PC MP3 player sites (found during my extensive searches for a solution!) that a solution can be found by joining the tracks as one file and using "cue sheets" - essentially small text files - to determine placement of individual songs, but I an't find any refernece to them with respect to the iPod. Anyone have any insight?
Any help would be appreciated.
fish
Comments
You probably already know this, but... the iPod doesnt play music directly off of the harddrive, because a constantly spinning harddrive would kill the battery quick and put the harddrive in constant peril. So it works like this, it pulls music off the harddrive and loads it into its RAM in 32MB increments, this usually like 6 or 7 songs. After that runs out, it loads another 32MB of music off the harddrive. The Point It's during this load time, or frequent scanning between songs, that you'll experience the longest gap.
Unless your songs are each 32MB in size (which is quite easy to obtain with a high bit-rate, or if you like alot of spoken word and folk music), this shouldn't be what's causing the gap. I rip my music at 320kbps at a high frequency, so my files end up pretty big, and I experience "the gap" every four songs or so.
Also, on the joining issue. You've got 10GB to play with... you could rip two versions of the album, one that's a single continuous song, and then rip the songs individually. That way, you have your flow when you want it, and you can access each track individually. Just put them in separate playlists, and there you go.
Otherwise, I don't know of anyway to edit the gap between songs, aside from manually removing any silence at the beginning or end of each of your songs. 10 gb iPod, eh, that'll take awhile. As I said, I haven't personally experienced a particularly annoying gap, so this could simply be a matter of taste.
Anyone else?
ciao,
michael
[ 10-02-2002: Message edited by: scadboy ]</p>
You won't notice it if the two songs are completely seperate tracks (since they have a natural gap between them, anyways), only if the two songs are part of one long continuos piece of music (ala Pink Floyd, Dave Matthews, etc)
However, since all the data is in the RAM, and Apple has made it clear that music quality is one of their main priorities, I hold faith that this will eventually be taken care of in a future firmware update.
Guess I'll deal with it and wait for a possible firmware update.
Oh and by the way, just saw this...
<a href="http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0210/03.gap.php"; target="_blank">http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0210/03.gap.php</a>;
Maybe Steve will finally start wearing something different to these shindigs - like a jumpsuit made out of hemp!
thanks again
fish
iTunes DOES NOT add silence to the end of every track that's located on your HD. (at least it never has with the dozens of cd's i've ripped)
i'm listening to Pink Floyd right now, and these tracks flow perfectly together, and there's no gap.
now on your iPod it should be the exact same deal. the only time you'd ever hear a gap would be when the 32 MB buffer is used up. shouldn't be often though, and if you aren't skipping all over the place with your songs, should be pretty short.
The gap I'm refering to is when listening to MP3s, encoded by iTunes, in both iTunes and on my iPod. I'm encoding @256k, with iTunes set to automatically import upon inserting a CD. I am not joining the tracks as one MP3, nor does this have anything to do with the gap size selection for CD burning - I'm talking MP3s only.
The gaps are there, and in fact I opened the MP3 files in an audio editor and there is indeed a small gap of silence at the beginning and end of the files. I do a lot of recording/mastering of high end audio, and am pretty familiar with waveforms and the editor itself. Not trying to argue or say that I'm doing everything correctly - just telling it like it is, or at least seems to be, on my end.
Regardless, even after deleting these gaps in the editor, iTunes still puts a space in there. Like I mentioned before, the crossfade feature does alleviate it for the most part, but not on the iPod (which as I understand does not as of yet support the crossfading feature - is this true?)
How do you encode CDs? Any thoughts on what might be happening? I'm pulling the songs from a firewire Yamaha CDR drive, which works MUCH better than the built in DVD drive from Apple (which is what I started encoding from, and also had the gap problem).
Although I originally couldn't find much info on this subject, it seems as though the more I look into it across the web, I am coming across a number of others who are having this problem.
FYI - I have the original 10GB model (pre touch-sensitive scroll wheel) running version 1.2.1. I am using iTunes 3.0.1 in OS X 10.2.1 on a G4/400, 708MB RAM.
Again, any help is appreciated
Thanks,
fish
[ 10-04-2002: Message edited by: fishcarp ]
[ 10-04-2002: Message edited by: fishcarp ]</p>
-aoeu
<strong>i believe, if i'm not mistaken, that there is a way to "merge tracks" in itunes so that they play seamlessly. perhaps someone else can elaborate on the details...</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, there is a way (I mentioned it earlier - it's the "join tracks" feature), which does work, but doesn't allow you direct access to the individual songs. It encodes the entire album (or the two, or three, or four songs you want to flow - whatever you choose to join) as one MP3 - the only way to get to individual songs is to manually use the "scrub" feature with the scroll wheel, and then it's kinda hit and miss. The simplest solution (in my mind anyway - I ain't no programmer!) would be for Apple to fix the firmware to use the aforementioned "cue sheet" text files to log the position of the individual songs, as is done with some PC MP3 players.
I'm less bothered by the gaps the more I use the iPod, probably 'cause I'm getting more and more albums uploaded that DON'T flow song to song. However, I still consider it a very annoying flaw, and am hoping for a firmware fix eventually. Doesn't seem like it should be that hard.
Thanks
fish
[ 10-18-2002: Message edited by: fishcarp ]</p>
I don't think it's caused by iTunes encoding. I encoded some of them using some old PC shareware program and others were downloaded from various sources.
To be fair, every MP3 playing program I've seen has this problem. The crossfader is a nice hack, but not a solution.
i just looked at all the files, sure enough there's a small silence at the end of each. turns out i happened to hit the sweet spot on the crossfade. just happens to be exact length of the pause at the end of the songs and is completely unnoticeable.
until i imported them into Sound Studio it'd never occurred to me there might be a gap.
weird part is the cross fade seems to have also followed over to my iPod, so i don't have any breaks on there either. i guess my suggestion would be to mess around with the crossfade. it is possible to get it exactly right to match the silence added to the tracks.
sorry for the misleading info above.
<img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
-alcimedes