If there's one thing iTunes + iPod dominates...

[Waspinators]

It's gapless playback... I've been killing myself trying to find out how to get my files to play gaplessly on WMP/foobar2000/Zune, and nothing's working. Nearly all of my files play with perfect gapless playback in iTunes, no gaps, clicks, nothing. Not the case with any other music program. What's Apple using to get files to play gaplessly? Because they've clearly perfected it.

Anyone else experienced this? I've almost considered selling my Zune (had it for maybe a month) and buying an iPod just for that (yes I'm very obsessive).

[Deiparous]

With the new Firmware, Zune has gapless playback on the device.

If your files are stored as MP3 that could be your problem as MP3s almost always have blankspace at the ends of the file.

[Waspinators]

Yeah, they're all MP3, but if they play perfectly in iTunes, why not anything else? I'm not using the crossfade, so Apple must have put something in iTunes to make it play gapless MP3s with no hiccups.

[stkr]

Well iTunes has the ability to add gapless to any music file. iTunes also has it's own database. A lot of the options that we can change in iTunes are not embedded in the file, but are stored in that database. I'm assuming that gapless is one of them. We probably won't see the feature perfected with the Zune until MS adds the option to add it within the software instead of having it done automatically.

[Waspinators]

Originally Posted by stkr

Well iTunes has the ability to add gapless to any music file. iTunes also has it's own database. A lot of the options that we can change in iTunes are not embedded in the file, but are stored in that database. I'm assuming that gapless is one of them. We probably won't see the feature perfected with the Zune until MS adds the option to add it within the software instead of having it done automatically.

Hmm... hope that'll happen someday, but considering they only play gaplessly in iTunes and not foobar or WMP, I kinda doubt it.

[Gow616]

Originally Posted by Waspinators

It's gapless playback... I've been killing myself trying to find out how to get my files to play gaplessly on WMP/foobar2000/Zune, and nothing's working.

Gapless Info: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Gapless
foobar200: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....tle=Foobar2000

Features

* Powerful open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player, including the ability to fully replace the user interface.
* Full Unicode support: file names, user interface, tagging, etc.
* ReplayGain support: both playback and writing ReplayGain information to file tags.
* Gapless playback.
* Advanced tagging capabilities - through built-in Properties dialog and various optional tagging-related components.
* Built-in Media Library functionality.
* Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
* Support for transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component (requires external commandline encoder executables for different output formats).
* Secure CD ripping.
* Streaming support.
* Efficient handling of large playlists.
* User interface with simple configuration to create even complex layouts quickly and easily.
* Highly customizable display of track information using title formating scripts.

Set playback to default and no gaps will be noticed between song transitioning.

[Meekins]

my wmp has gapless playback..

[Waspinators]

Actually, by the looks of it, it seems to be how my files were encoded. Many are encoded with proper LAME tags, and do play back fine in foobar2000, but many others (mostly my... "acquired" files) are ripped with God-knows-what (yet iTunes handles it fine). But, that brings me back to my point. Clearly, iTunes has some kind of advanced code that allows most files to play with perfect gapless, regardless of what was used to rip the CD.

EDIT: Weird, I put an album on my Zune (Catch Thirtythree by Meshuggah, a completely gapless album) and it plays back without gaps on my Zune, though on some tracks there are some clicks in the transition (which aren't there in iTunes). This is one album that only played back gaplessly on iTunes and not on any other program. Perhaps Microsoft just needs to polish up this feature in the next update.

[Gow616]

A crossfader plugin is what it has. Grab the foobar2000 0.9.5.4 beta from the foobar2000 website it has a new crossfader plugin that be set all the way to 200ms.