Gapless playback on HiMD and SS3.4

[Kaledi]

OK, I've come across a curious problem.

I usually do the following to transfer tracks to my HiMD player.

Rip music at a high bitrate/WAV onto the computer then manually convert tracks to either 132kps and or 64kps for transfer to Hi-MD. I do this manually so that the transfer times are shorter than having to do the conversion on the fly. Doing this with SS results in 'not quite' gapless playback, you get a very short pause between tracks after transfer.

When I upgraded to SS3.4 I did some playing to see if this had been resolved and found that if you transferred and did any conversion on the fly or transferred at the ripped bitrate, then you getreal gapless playback.

Now last night I transferred U2's Rattle and Hum, which is a mixture and I noticed that if I transferred previously converted bitrates, then you don't get gapless, and even more intriguing, you get sounds at the beginning of some tracks that are not supposed to be there - specifically sounds of crowds shouting. The original WAV music files are correct and when you transfer and do the conversion on the fly everything is fine? So really what I wanted to know is if

1. Anyone else had an answer to the reason why you have to do the conversion on the fly to get gapless playback and

2. Anyone else have experience of odd results with extra 'bits' added to tracks?

[pauljones52]

Are the extra 'bits' by any chance the end of the track before? If so yes i have this problem!

[Kaledi]

At the beginning of the track! I've just ripped another live CD and this time I don't appear to have a problem either way of transfering. mmm, will do some more investigating

[dex Otaku]

As mentioned in another thread, this could be because of the read-offset of your optical drive.

Also, when transcoding audio, the length of a given track may change slightly, depending on the framelength of each format.

Still, there's no reason why track marks should actually *move* perceptibly unless the read offset of your drive is quite large [most drives I've checked this on are within 150 samples of "accurate", though I have seen one drive whose offset was -733, which is over 1/75th of a second - which is still relatively short].

In the end, if what you want is accurate gapless rips to listen to on your HiMD, the only way to be assured that you'll get such is to either rip directly from the original CD or to convert from files that follow CD's 75fps [such as accurately ripped WAV files from Exact Audio Copy or CD-extractor].

Basically, the destination can only be as good [i.e. as accurate] as the source.

[jelly.bean]

I am getting the problem where one hears half a second of the last song at the beginning of a track. (The track mark is placed a bit too early). This is not due to the ripping process because if I rip to WAV the track marks are in the right position but once I convert to ATRAC3plus and delete the WAVs, the track marks "migrate". It seems other people have this problem too. I hope someone has an answer.