Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Still, it relies on ad-hoc LAME-"proprietary" headers, which weren't even introduced until late 2001, I think.

It only guarantees sample-accurate gapless with the headers, but the heuristics used on files without the headers are actually pretty good in practice.
Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Point being that it would be nice if the standard had the ability to encode arbitrary-length audio. (Well, without intentionally blank samples. Even CDs have to be in quanta of 44100ths of a second.) It's the spec that should have the fail attached to it in this case, IMO.

CDs have to be in quanta of 75ths of a second: track breaks can only come at frame boundaries. And while in a sense the MP3 spec does come with built-in fail, other formats (Vorbis, FLAC, WMA) can encode arbitrary-length audio, and any added fail there is purely proprietary. I'm not sure about AAC; the Wikipedia article groups it with MP3 in the post-hoc-hacks list.

Peter