Dark Side of the Moon on iTunes Store? Gapless songs?

Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
I already have Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd, for anyone who's been living at the aforementioned location), so I'm not going to purchase the album again just to satisfy my curiosity, but I'm wondering how well iTunes is going to be able to handle music like this that has no silent gaps between most of the songs.



I just tried importing one of my own CDs that are like this. I got smooth playback within my playlist, letting one track play right into the next, but even after setting my iTunes preferences to "None" for the "Gap Between Songs" setting, and making sure that "Use Sound Check" was checked off, a CD-RW burned from this playlist clicked and stuttered briefly between tracks.



Is there some hidden feature, perhaps only within "professionally" encoded AAC files to get around this problem? Or, as I suspect, is a person buying an album such a Dark Side of the Moon from the iTunes Music Store going to get a substantially less satisfying experience from using an iTunes-generated CD of purchased music?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9
    chychchych Posts: 860member
    Maybe you should check the 'cross fade' setting? I keep mine to the lowest setting and it does smooth playback for most songs, though not all. On higher settings it cuts the end too much for my tastes.
  • Reply 2 of 9
    sebseb Posts: 676member
    I've found toast to be the best solution for this.



    There are some other cd burning utilities on versiontracker, but I've never tried them.



    Bummer, eh. \
  • Reply 3 of 9
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by seb

    I've found toast to be the best solution for this.



    There are some other cd burning utilities on versiontracker, but I've never tried them.



    Bummer, eh. \




    I have Toast, but I'm doubting Toast is going to understand AAC files. I suppose I can give it a try now, just in case it ties into some more general system audio capability...



    Woo hoo! Toast does understand AAC file, by going through Quicktime apparently, and Toast will burn gapless track sequences properly.



    It would still be a whole helluva lot more convenient for me if iTunes would do this itself. Besides, Apple shouldn't expect people who don't have Toast to buy extra software for so basic a thing. At least I have a work-around for now.
  • Reply 4 of 9
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    if u have it at none there is no reason why iTunes should have 'gaps'



    i doubt it but perhaps its because its a CD-RW?





    i dont know what to tell u because it works fine for me
  • Reply 5 of 9
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ast3r3x

    if u have it at none there is no reason why iTunes should have 'gaps'



    i doubt it but perhaps its because its a CD-RW?




    I also doubt that CD-RW makes any difference, especially since I made a good gapless CD-RW with Toast. Testing the very specific combinations of iTunes + CD-RW vs iTunes + CD-R doesn't seem likely enough to produce interesting results to be worth the likely creation of yet another frisbee.



    Quote:

    i dont know what to tell u because it works fine for me



    Please realize when I'm talking about gaps, I'm talking about very brief momentary gaps that produce a click, pop, or muting between songs -- not something measurable in whole seconds even, but annoying nevertheless.



    I've been googling about this, and I'm not the only one having the problem, nor is iTunes the only place where this happens.



    I've also noticed that playing directly from iTunes playlists that I can't get gapless plackback of contiguous tracks either. The closest I can get is by turning on the "Crossfade playback" preference, with the crossfade duration set to zero. This hides most of the inter-track gaps, but doesn't do so perfectly or consistently.
  • Reply 6 of 9
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    Have you tried the "join cd tracks" option in iTunes? Maybe if you join the tracks and the burn it through iTunes, there won't be gaps? I've got Dark Side of the Moon too, but I've never encoded it. Maybe I'll try it if you're not willing to.
  • Reply 7 of 9
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by torifile

    Have you tried the "join cd tracks" option in iTunes? Maybe if you join the tracks and the burn it through iTunes, there won't be gaps? I've got Dark Side of the Moon too, but I've never encoded it. Maybe I'll try it if you're not willing to.



    I'm pretty sure this will work if you're starting from a CD, but...
    • That doesn't help someone who buys DSotM, or other albums like it, from iTMS.

    • You'd have to carefully examine every CD before importing it to find the continuous-flow tracks that you'd want to join.

    • You have to give up having separate tracks for separate songs, settling for big multi-song clumps instead.

    Since Toast can figure out how to burn such tracks, imported as one file per track, without creating audible gaps, then iTunes should be able to figure out how to burn CDs without gaps too, not to mention that both iTunes and the iPod should be able to achieve gapless playback of these kinds of tracks.
  • Reply 8 of 9
    There's two issues here: gapless CD burning and gapless audio files.



    The first is possible to do with the right tools/a bit of care, the second currently isn't with AAC.



    This doesn't mean you'll always have a multi-second gap between songs, but it means you might get an audible click or pop at the start/end of tracks that don't fade in/out.
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