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gapless atrac files?

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thepeter

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Whenever I use SS 2.1 to create atrac3plus files, they cease to play seamlessly. I upload a recorded concert from a hi-md recorder and the PCM .OMG files play without any gaps between files. And when i create .WAV files, everything is still fine. However, the atrac3plus files i make from the .OMG files have tiny little gaps in between tracks.

Is there any way to keep the little gaps from appearing? The only reason I want to make the files into atracs in the first place is because I do a lot of traveling so a compact music collection is high on the priority list. And my Sony CD player won't play mp3 files seamlessly, only atrac files. but if i can't make the stupid atrac files without the gaps in the first place, it kind of defeats the purpose. And who wants live recordings with gaps in between tracks?

thanks

Peter

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Use a program like Nero to make an image file (choose image recorder from the recorders tab), then use something like Daemon tools (www.daemon-tools.cc) to mount the image. SS thinks Daemon tools is a real CD drive & as such the image is a real CD. Works a treat & I use this for my MP3 albums as it saves me entering all the details (most of my MP3's are V1 and short titiles)

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  • 4 months later...

Why make it so complicated? How much more difficult would it be for developers to allow the user to not have a gap in between songs and I'd go as far as to say not having the gap would be the default selection. Users have what they want to put on the medium. Why does it have to be modified?

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Gapless playback relies on following a certain number [the same as CD's] of frames per second [75fps]. The length of a given track has to be an exact number of frames in order to meet seemlessly with the next track.

This is not so much a defect of atrac as a "standard" set by MD's several affiliations with CD.

Basically, if you can make it work gapless on a CD, it should work as gapless as atrac as well.

There are several threads in which advice on how to do this has been offered. I'd suggest searching the fora for "gapless".

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Gapless playback relies on following a certain number [the same as CD's] of frames per second [75fps].  The length of a given track has to be an exact number of frames in order to meet seemlessly with the next track. 

This is not so much a defect of atrac as a "standard" set by MD's several affiliations with CD.

Basically, if you can make it work gapless on a CD, it should work as gapless as atrac as well. 

There are several threads in which advice on how to do this has been offered.  I'd suggest searching the fora for "gapless".

I'll have a look at the other advice in a minute, but CDs can do Write-As-Once and write the cds without a gap. Admittedly with cds this means they do have to be locked afterwards, but minidisks are completely different surely. They can be modifed after they have been written. Why not write all the data as a one single track then split where it needs to be split. You can't modify cds in that way, but surely computers can send a message to a md player which will then split the track as needs. Surely as simple as!

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I'll have a look at the other advice in a minute, but CDs can do Write-As-Once and write the cds without a gap. Admittedly with cds this means they do have to be locked afterwards, but minidisks are completely different surely. They can be modifed after they have been written. Why not write all the data as a one single track then split where it needs to be split. You can't modify cds in that way, but surely computers can send a message to a md player which will then split the track as needs. Surely as simple as!

Yes, you can DAO CD-Rs; for tracks to actually be gapless, they still must conform to exact 75fps framelengths; otherwise you'll get padding at the end of the track which creates a glitch [gap] in the recording.

CDs and MDs are split up by sectors for tracking where music [data] is. Those sectors are a fixed size; to have two of them meet [remain gapless], the first one has to be "full" in order to meet the second. The sector size limits editing resolution.

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To ensure my mp3s have the correct number of frames I use a wonderful little program called mpTrim biggrin.gif

The Basic version is Freeware and I thoroughly recommend it. If you want to do very big files or batches then you need to buy the pro version.

Edited by MusicBringer
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I've heard that Nero uses a special to trick to make an audio CD gapless: if you have two tracks A and B, it moves a small portion of audio from track A to B, or the other way around, to make sure A has exactly an integer number of frames. That way, the transition from A to B will be gapless.

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I've heard that Nero uses a special to trick to make an audio CD gapless: if you have two tracks A and B, it moves a small portion of audio from track A to B, or the other way around, to make sure A has exactly an integer number of frames. That way, the transition from A to B will be gapless.

This is interesting .. it would basically be crossfading the tracks and moving the track mark to the nearest frame, much as gapless mp3 playback works with the relevant plugins in winamp, foobar2000, &c.

I always edit audio as contiguous files, so I never run into the gapping problems. Ever. Just add track marks in Nero or CD Architect, and burn. It also makes it a lot easier to handle disc-wide edits like normalising, compression/limiting, channel conversion et al that usually get done to an entire recording, not just single tracks.

But then, I'm rather fussy about these things.

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This is interesting .. it would basically be crossfading the tracks and moving the track mark to the nearest frame, much as gapless mp3 playback works with the relevant plugins in winamp, foobar2000, &c. 

I always edit audio as contiguous files, so I never run into the gapping problems.  Ever.  Just add track marks in Nero or CD Architect, and burn.  It also makes it a lot easier to handle disc-wide edits like normalising, compression/limiting, channel conversion et al that usually get done to an entire recording, not just single tracks. 

But then, I'm rather fussy about these things.

I'm not really sure about it. I once heard about it, or read it somewhere. It would also mean, that if you set track marks in Nero, it will snap it to the nearest frame.

By the way, a little off topic, but does anyone know about a freeware program with which you can set track marks (graphically) and save the result as seperate wave files? For instance, I'd like to split live recordings without using CUE sheets and the like.

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By the way, a little off topic, but does anyone know about a freeware program with which you can set track marks (graphically) and save the result as seperate wave files? For instance, I'd like to split live recordings without using CUE sheets and the like.

I've used Acid Music successfully like this. You can import/record audio, split it up to your heart's content, copy and paste each chunk to a new file and then export the files to wav. Kinda fiddly I know but it works. I've used this in the past to record shows off the radio straight into my computer (line in), then split them up, and then burn a CD with Nero with each wav as a seperate track. The CD then plays gapless.

Acid Music isn't actually free, but there is a few version called Acid XPress which should let you do it. Link: http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/prod...uct.asp?pid=906

Something interesting, my (old) version of Acid lets you burn a CD of your "creation" straight from the program if you so desire, and just looking at the Acid site now, the newer (retail) version also lets you copy it STRAIGHT TO NET MD from within the program!!!! I never knew that.

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By the way, a little off topic, but does anyone know about a freeware program with which you can set track marks (graphically) and save the result as seperate wave files? For instance, I'd like to split live recordings without using CUE sheets and the like.

I use a program called cdwave that works great. It automatically splits tracks on sector boundaries (for gapless playback). It is also shareware.

http://etree.org/cdwave.html

Edited by Ryzir
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Hello dex Otaku, just re-read that remark. Do you mean to say that if you have say a dozen tracks you merge them into ONE mp3 (or whatever format you use)  blink.gif

Any tracks that are contiguous, i.e. that run from one to the next and need to be gapless on the final CD/MD/Hi-MD - yes, I join them all together, edit them as a single piece, and add track marks later. In the end this ends up being a faster way to do things, and is 100% guaranteed to maintain gapless playback on the destination medium without resorting to crossfades or anything like that.

My editing chain usually goes something like this:

* Hi-MD -> Sonicstage

* export unedited files as master backup

* combine/split contiguous tracks with SS

* export tracks as editing master [after this step SS is no longer involved in any way]

* edit the tracks

* create CD layout + burn CD

* rip CD with EAC to WAV image with DAO cuesheet

* convert WAV CD image to FLAC and edit cuesheet to reflect this

* convert the source WAV files to FLAC

* rip and tag from the CD [the image file actually] to MP3 and any other desired formats

* copy all files to DVD-R

The MP3s &c. at the end of the chain are separate tracks, and are not inherently gapless.

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