Hi there - I'm wondering if Empeg puts spaces between tracks during playback. I'm hoping that it doesn't, as I have a lot of music that's meant to be continuous, although it is broken up into individual tracks.

Thanks,
Oscar

We've discussed this one at great length in other threads already. It's one of my pet causes as well, since I have some concert albums and some Pink Floyd albums where it's important to me that they be able to play gapless.

Before going any further, there some things you should know about gapless MP3 playback. Understand that there are two distinct and separate elements to it: 1) Being able to create MP3s that don't have gaps to begin with, and 2) Having a player that will play back those MP3s without adding gaps.

As far as the second one is concerned: No, at this time, the Empeg does not play the tracks completely gapless. It inserts a very tiny pause between the tracks. This pause is smaller than the corresponding pause you find in many computer MP3 players, but it's there. It is perhaps about 1/32nd of a second. The Empeg folks are aware of it, but I don't think it's high on their priority list at this time.

As far as the first one goes, I was having a lot of trouble even creating MP3s that were gapless to begin with. I was using the Fraunhofer command-line encoder at 128k, and it was inserting partial frames of silence both at the beginning and the end of every song. I ended up writing a utility to trim frames and interactively preview the gap (if you're interested, you can find it at my home page, click on my signature to go there). I've been told that a VBR encoder (such as Xing's) will do gapless encoding, and I've just bought AudioCatalyst, so I'm going to try it out for myself and find out for sure if it really creates gapless MP3s or not.

In the end, though, the lack of gapless playback on the Empeg isn't as big of a problem as I thought it would be. I don't listen to albums sequentially as much as I used to. I much prefer to shuffle-play my entire collection now.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

Well, a large percentage of my audio collection consists of concerts and DJ-mixed sets which aren't supposed to have any gaps between tracks. I can live with the limitation (especially if the gap is tiny), but I don't understand why more developers don't take the time to code their players for gapless operation.

FYI: There's a plugin for WinAmp which buffers the next track so that there aren't any gaps.

Oscar

There's a plugin for WinAmp which buffers the next track so that there aren't any gaps.

Actually, there's more than one of them, and I do use one in WinAmp. My problem isn't getting WinAmp to play gapless, my problem is getting the MP3s to be gapless to begin with when they're being encoded. That was my point of the last message- it doesn't do any good to have a gapless player if your files have silence artificially inserted into the actual files themselves- something that many encoders do.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144