Gapless playback comes to iPod... FINALLY!

iTunes 7 is out with a host of new features. The best (for me anyway) being the support of gapless playback for your live albums, audiobooks and classical works.

Here are the other upgrades if you care.

Oh my God that is good news… it bugs me on live albums and musical theatre soundtracks. It says there’s also a new feature that lets you flip through your albums based on the cover art! Rock on.

I don’t see anything in that article about playback on the iPod.

Sorry, on closer reading, combined with use of “Ctrl-F”, I found it buried in the middle of the article:

How does that make sense? Why would you ever not want gapless playback?

I’m afraid to upgrade my itunes, as I spent several hours renaming songs and artists to make everything flow. If I upgrade, I won’t lose that and have to go back and recatalog, will I?

Records and CDs used for popular music have silent gaps in between the racks. If you want an itunes album to sound the same as the record or CD, you need the gaps. The problem is that some music, such as opera recordings, have no gaps.

There are also songs that slightly fade into each other. An effect I hear alot in modern music. Even if its the slightest connection between songs…the gap that Itunes and ipods add is unbearable. This is great that they finally have this feature, as it was probably the only gripe i had with Ipods

And the fact that I have 40 minute songs that are divided into 5 or so tracks. Those gaps are Really Annoying!

That’s not true. If a CD has two seconds of silence at the end of a track, then the AAC file ripped into iTunes and played on iPod will have those same two seconds. But iPod inserts an additional gap between each track, so you end up with either a slightly longer gap than intended by the artist, or a gap where none at all was intended. Eliminating this additional gap would result in playback identical to the original CD. Why would you ever want additional gaps when the original CD didn’t contain them?

In other words, “gapless playback” really means that the original CD’s gaps, or lack of gaps, is retained without changes. I can’t understand why Apple would consider that a feature to be toggled on and off, rather than a bug they’ve finally corrected.

Gapless playback probably requires extra hard drive activity and therefore makes the battery run out more quickly.

iTunes should be modifying the ID3 tag, which is contained in the mp3 itself. And even if it doesn’t, the upgrade will most likely preserve your settings.

Probably not. The only annoying thing I tend to find with iTunes’ upgrades is it doesn’t seem to pay much attention to some of my view settings when a new version goes in.

For example, I set up with the ‘browser’ on. The default is off, so when I upgrade I have to go to View, then *Preferences *and turn the browser back on.

All my tags, playlists, art, etc are always untouched after an upgrade.

In general, iPod doesn’t hit the hard disk every time it loads a new track. It loads several at once into RAM and plays them from there. The pause in between tracks is the result of poor buffer management in software.

If there are two songs that blend together and you never want to hear them separately, and you own the CD and are ripping them yourself, you can select the two tracks and choose Advanced>Join CD Tracks. This will consolidate them into one track and you can rip them like that.

I’m still waiting for them to make an iPod that can ‘insert’ a song into a currently playing playlist. As it stands, if I have my playlist going and wnt to hear a specific song that isn’t in that list, I have to find it by artist, album, or song title and play it…which then stops the current playlist from playing. So I then have to go back and start the playlist again after that song is done, and then scroll back to where I was in that playlist. How fucking hard is it to make it a menu option to have a song play by itself when selected, or inserted into current playlist? And from what I understand, people have been asking for this feature since day one.

You mean ‘On-the-go playlists’?
From the link:

No; with “On the go,” you can’t reorder, or slip a song into the middle of an existing list. You can only add it to the end of your On-the-go list.

My worry is, my harddrive is too small so I tend to delete songs from my hard drive after I’ve uploaded them to my iPod; my iTunes library contains about a thousand songs, while my iPod hold 5,000. If I update my iPod with this new version, will it update my iPod library too? Will I have to re-rip and re-upload 4,000 songs?

Yay! As a classical music dork, I approve.

The album art upgrade is neat, but definitely in its infancy…some things I noticed when I did the art download for my library:

Only about 1/3 of my albums have art available (or able to find). I’m eclectic, but many big mainstream albums are not catalogued. No Alice Cooper art found, only half of my Bowie art was found (and no Ziggy Stardust!). The only Jethro Tull art found was for Aqualung Live!, which it misassigned onto my studio Aqualung.

Most amusing, Queen’s Greatest Hits was labeled with the art for some dreadlocked lady named Queen Ekanem. She looks nice and friendly, but I don’t want her coming up on the screen during my Queen songs.

It also couldn’t find any cover art for any soundtracks, like The Aviator, Trainspotting, Garden State, etc.

My stuff is all home rips from cd though, not purchased through the Apple store, so maybe that is part of the problem.

A neat curiosity, but it doesn’t seem to work well yet.

I see it as a free convenience, but nothing I’d rely on. Most of my music comes from video games, and you can imagine how hard it is to find albums – much less artwork – for those…