[LAU] Playing a concept album...

[Rob]

On Saturday 23 April 2011 18:45, Arnold Krille wrote:
> On Sunday 24 April 2011 00:32:38 lanas wrote:
> >   But, once ripped to ogg files and played from a m3u source (eg.
> > sequentially) there are - no surprise - small blank cuts between each
> > piece, which can be  disturbing in such a context.  The context here
> It has nothing to do with the way the mp3/ogg/flac/wav is encoded and it
>  has nothing to do with the kind of music (live-recordings face the same
>  problem).

Well, in the case of mp3s, it does have to do with how the file is encoded.  
If the end of a piece of music doesn't coincide with an mp3 frame boundary, 
and it almost never does, there'll be up to 24 milliseconds of silence, 
enough to make a skipping noise even if your gapless playback program 
concatenates the files perfectly.  I think LAME or cdparanoia might 
introduce some additional problem, as I just brought up the individual 
tracks of my copy of Dark Side of the Moon and Brain Damage has 38 
milliseconds of silence at the end before Eclipse, which isn't present in 
the other copy I have that I ripped as one long track.

There's no way that I've found to rejoin the tracks programmatically 
without access to the original recording.  The best gapless playback effect 
I've found was a plugin for I think xmms years ago that let me crossfade 
about 50ms between tracks, and that still created the occasional glitch.

I have so many ripped CDs affected by this between prog rock, dance mixes, 
and live albums that I might well have to re-rip all 1100-odd discs to FLAC 
(since disk space is an order of magnitude cheaper than when I started 
ripping to mp3) to correct this problem.  But even if you encode an entire 
disc to one big mp3 file and then cut it into tracks on frame boundaries 
rather than doing the cutting before encoding, the problem is eliminated.  
It's just that I've never seen a ripper program that'll do so, and when I 
was writing the scripts I used to rip CDs en masse, I wasn't aware of the 
problem yet.

Rob