Gapless

[Batman]

Yo,

looong time lurker... ;-) I'm a proud owner of a R91 and (recently, but it's still past...) MZ-NH900.

I've used these 2 jewels a lot, but in the past years I forgot about them, till I had to go to Greece, and since a 5 hours bus trip seemed a lot to me, I decided to load my NH900 with some music, on an ordinary 80min disc.

Ok, long story short, last thing I remember was that listening to the Pink Floyd's The Wall, ripped and transferred with SS, there were gaps between the songs, where indeed there shouldn't be any.

Now, few days ago, I uploaded another suite, gapless album, such as Fish's Raingods With Zippos, and to my surprise, listening to it I found no gap, nor tick between the songs (using the NH900, BTW).

Is this the new (and not bad, really!!!) behavior of SS (using 4.2 ATM)?

Ah, one more thing. The album wasn't ripped with SS, but extracted to .wav with a Linux box, and then converted by SS while transferring.

Just want to know. I simply prefer MDs over the many solid-state/hard-disk MP stuff, because they remind me of the old cassette-time, I simply like having to play around with medias... being just more reliable and fast-loadable, and now with this ATRAC lossless format, I found myself in love once again ;-)

Cheers, A.

[Batman]

I see a lot of people had a look at this, but nobody replied, maybe because I didn't sound like I needed an answer...

Well, the thing is:

Is it true that now MDs play gapless where the original songs on the CD have no gap, or is it just me that cannot perceive it any more? You know, maybe my 40s are playing tricks to my ears, and what few years ago was horrible to hear today is just acceptable... Or maybe I should try it with the albums I used to notice the gaps (e.g. The Wall), as could be that, luckily, in the ones I'm listening to now, for some reason the gap doesn't get involved in the music frame generation.

Thanks for any comment.

Cheers, A.

[rosjos]

I see a lot of people had a look at this, but nobody replied, maybe because I didn't sound like I needed an answer...

Well, the thing is:

Is it true that now MDs play gapless where the original songs on the CD have no gap, or is it just me that cannot perceive it any more? You know, maybe my 40s are playing tricks to my ears, and what few years ago was horrible to hear today is just acceptable... Or maybe I should try it with the albums I used to notice the gaps (e.g. The Wall), as could be that, luckily, in the ones I'm listening to now, for some reason the gap doesn't get involved in the music frame generation.

Thanks for any comment.

Cheers, A.

Sonicstage / MD has always been gapless, so it is nothing to do with the version of SS that you are using. However, I am aware that gaps (very slight, not the obvious 'mp3' sized gaps) can be generated if you change the bitrate of the tracks when transferring across from SS to your MD, ie 352kbps on Sonicstage transferred to your MD/Walkman at 132kbps.

The only other explanation I can offer is that the album was imported into Sonicstage in a format other than ATRAC, introducing gaps along the way. I would suggest re-rip The Wall into Sonicstage at the bitrate you intend to transfer to your HiMD/MD player, and you should find it is gapless on both SS and your MD.

Hope this helps!

[culp4684]

OK...I believe I've found your answer. I was wondering the same thing because I had transferred the Beatles "Love" album last year and could have sworn I heard slight gaps between the many songs that run together.

Evidently it has to do with how the transfer mode settings are selected. If you set them to "standard transfer mode" and no conversion has to take place, you will get gapless results. If you select a different bit rate, you'll hear gaps in between the songs.

I just verified this by transferring the above mentioned Beatles album and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". All my music is saved in My Library at 256 kbps. I did the first job making one disc with both titles in standard mode and presto...no gaps. I then did another disc converting the 256 kbps to 192. Gaps were very evident...

Edit: OK...looks like Rosjos beat me to it. I'm just a slower typer!

Edited October 7, 2008 by culp4684

[rosjos]

Edit: OK...looks like Rosjos beat me to it. I'm just a slower typer!

Yeah, but your explanation sounds better

Edited October 7, 2008 by rosjos

[Batman]

Ok,

this all makes sense, I mean, in the past... as I cannot say "how" I did import The Wall in SS, nor how I transferred it to the MD...

But this time I know for sure that I first ripped all the tracks into WAVs from the Linux box, then sent to the MD at default (or forced on the fly) baudrate.

But no other conversion took place, e.g. from WAV to any ATRAC, and then from those ATRACs to any other ATRAC.

Anyway, if this is the way to follow, I will.

I mean, if just this little effort needs to be done in order to avoid the more-than-one-second-gap you can get with an iPod... well, I'm for it.

Thank you all guys for the answares, and happy MD-ing ;-)

Cheers, A.

[pata2001]

Gapless CD to gapless MD (Atrac) is only achievable via:

1. Direct realtime recording.

2. Ripping all the tracks at once via Simpleburner/Sonicstage

Ripping the tracks individually (not at the same time) from the CD will introduce gaps. Ripping the tracks from CD into different bitrates will introduce gaps. Encoding/transcoding tracks from a file may introduce gaps.

Since you mentioned iPod, iPods (5G and later, nano 2G and later, Touch, iPhone) are perfectly gapless with MP3 (encoded via Lame/iTunes) and AAC (encoded via iTunes). There is no problems in ripping the tracks individually or using different/VBR bitrates, gapless playback is retained.

[Batman]

Encoding/transcoding tracks from a file may introduce gaps.

ok, since I didn't rip the CD from SB or SS, probably I was lucky, and encoding from WAV did not introduce gaps... I'm trying to do the procedure again with different albums where gapless is mandatory, in order to see if this behavior is consistent and can be reproduced.

Probably (well, I hope, now) WAVs aren't involved in any further conversion and behave just like the real rip.

It would be very annoying if I had to take the CDs out every time I need one of those to be transferred, as I always rip the CD with Linux, whether in WAV or FLAC.

Ok, I can always create a CD image, mount it, burn it as an audio CD, mount the image in the virtual machine, and then tell SS to rip that CD... but if it can be achieved directly from the WAVs I'd be very happy.

Since you mentioned iPod, iPods (5G and later, nano 2G and later, Touch, iPhone) are perfectly gapless with MP3 (encoded via Lame/iTunes) and AAC (encoded via iTunes). There is no problems in ripping the tracks individually or using different/VBR bitrates, gapless playback is retained.

I mentioned the iPod just because I read somewhere here-or-there that it added extremely big gaps (arbitrarily, 2 or 3 seconds), not that I've experienced on my own, as don't own any.

If now this is not true anymore, let's just ignore my comment.

Thanks anyway for clearing this out for me a little more.

Cheers, A.