Fixing an iTunes Music Store play-through track glitch
I just bought the Jocelyn Pook album "Flood" via iTMS, and discovered while listening to the album that it has one "play-through" track, where the music plays without pause as this track leads into the next. The way I discovered the problem was by hearing a drop-out when playing the album in my car using my iPod.
I always knew this was a potential problem with iTunes music. When ripping my own CDs I use the "Join CD Tracks" option on play-through tracks, preferring to sacrifice direct access to some individual tracks in order to avoid glitches (drop-outs, pops, or clicks) interrupting the enjoyment of my music.
When play-through tracks like these are purchased from iTMS, however, (or obtained from any other legal or illegal source of compressed music files) as separate files for each track, there's no simple way to avoid playback glitches. Listening via iTunes you'll hear these glitches. CDs burned from iTunes will glitch. Your iPod will glitch. I thought from one previous experiment that Toast could handle burning CDs like this without glitching like iTunes, but for this Jocelyn Pook album Toast didn't solve the problem either.
At least this album only had one such track. I'd hate to buy Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" from iTMS with all the play-through glitches that would entail.
Being too fussy to just live with this problem, I took one of the sample CD-RWs that I'd burned and re-ripped the troublesome track together with its following track as a single AIFF file, using iTunes's "Join CD Track" option.
I then opened the resulting AIFF file using the sound editing software Amadeus II 3.6. I found the tiny gap in the sound between the two tracks, and on my second attempt eliminated the gap leaving only a very faint click. Next, I used the Amadeus Sound Repair facility to clean up that click.
I now had a glitch-free version of two joined tracks in AIFF format. I re-encoded this as AAC, but at 192K rather than 128K, so as to reduce generational loss from a second cycle of compression. I pasted in the album art work, copied from an original "Flood" track, filled in the appropriate tag info for the new combined track, and then set aside the two original .m4p files by changing their album title to "Flood (original, pre-edit)".
Fortunately this kind of thing isn't a problem with too many albums, but in the future, given that iTMS and other such services are going to be a big part of music distribution, I would hope that AAC standards evolve to include play-through hints that allow glitch-free playback of contiguous music tracks.
I always knew this was a potential problem with iTunes music. When ripping my own CDs I use the "Join CD Tracks" option on play-through tracks, preferring to sacrifice direct access to some individual tracks in order to avoid glitches (drop-outs, pops, or clicks) interrupting the enjoyment of my music.
When play-through tracks like these are purchased from iTMS, however, (or obtained from any other legal or illegal source of compressed music files) as separate files for each track, there's no simple way to avoid playback glitches. Listening via iTunes you'll hear these glitches. CDs burned from iTunes will glitch. Your iPod will glitch. I thought from one previous experiment that Toast could handle burning CDs like this without glitching like iTunes, but for this Jocelyn Pook album Toast didn't solve the problem either.
At least this album only had one such track. I'd hate to buy Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" from iTMS with all the play-through glitches that would entail.
Being too fussy to just live with this problem, I took one of the sample CD-RWs that I'd burned and re-ripped the troublesome track together with its following track as a single AIFF file, using iTunes's "Join CD Track" option.
I then opened the resulting AIFF file using the sound editing software Amadeus II 3.6. I found the tiny gap in the sound between the two tracks, and on my second attempt eliminated the gap leaving only a very faint click. Next, I used the Amadeus Sound Repair facility to clean up that click.
I now had a glitch-free version of two joined tracks in AIFF format. I re-encoded this as AAC, but at 192K rather than 128K, so as to reduce generational loss from a second cycle of compression. I pasted in the album art work, copied from an original "Flood" track, filled in the appropriate tag info for the new combined track, and then set aside the two original .m4p files by changing their album title to "Flood (original, pre-edit)".
Fortunately this kind of thing isn't a problem with too many albums, but in the future, given that iTMS and other such services are going to be a big part of music distribution, I would hope that AAC standards evolve to include play-through hints that allow glitch-free playback of contiguous music tracks.