Hi
I play a lot of music (like opera,etc.) where the music is continuous across tracks. On a CD of course the player goes from one track to another without any sound of crossover. When I compress these tracks to MP3 or whatever I get a noticeable 'blip' or jump when going from one track to the next. It does not occur, of course, when there is a natural break in the music anyway. I've tried different compression rates and MP3 vs. OGG to no avail.
I have a new iriver clix 2 - which I think is great - but La Traviata with blips in it ain't much fun!
Anybody out there have an answer - I am sure there must be one, as this cannot be the first time the problem has occurred.
Incidentally, I have tried joining the tracks (using MP3 Joiner Cutter) but it makes no difference.
Thanks
What you're looking for is called gapless playback, and it's highly dependent upon the types of encoding and playback that you use. Standard MP3 files, for example, do not natively support gapless playback; instead, they allow for a little bit of padding of silence to the beginning of the file. And when you play back the file on a portable player, the unit needs to support gapless playback, too. Software that supports gapless playback includes iTunes (with Gapless turned on in the track properties) and Sony's SonicStage (in Atrac mode--not really recommended). Portable players that support gapless playback include the last couple generations of iPod (my new Classic automatically plays back gapless on the unit no matter what the setting was in iTunes, and does a good job of it) and Sony players that support Atrac encoding (which are the older units like their Network Walkmans and NetMD/Hi-MD MiniDiscs--new Sony players are WMA/MP3).
Now, there are a couple of options that you can use on programs. First, you can play with the crossfade capabilities of a software player. This can produce a fairly good result, but if you listen carefully, there will most likely be a click. This is a method compatible with MediaMonkey (with crossfade plugins), but it can be a little awkward to configure. Unfortunately, this method won't work on your portable player.
Second, you can chose to rip several tracks as one track (I've done this with an older version of Exact Audio Copy, for example). These have the advantage that they will play fine on your portable, but have the disadvantage that you may have to scan through a large file if you want to hear a later "track", and tagging won't be as accurate.
christian_g wrote:I have now got Exact Audio Copy and ripped away lots of continuous music with perfect results - all my Verdi & Wagner is now blipless
Thanks a lot
Cool! I'm glad it's working the way you need. EAC is a nice program in addition to MM.
