[LAU] Playing a concept album...

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Rob's message of 2011-04-24 06:32:12 +0200:
> 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

AFAIK Lame should be better in this regard than other encoders, but it
also requires a capable decoder.

From: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME
* Gapless playback with LAME-header compliant decoders

You might also want to have a look at:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=MP3
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=MP3
or the forums:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/