NW-HD3 not playing gapless with ATRAC files

[dougsing]

Hello,

I am an avid classical music fan and have previously use MiniDisc for my portable. I recently purchased a NW-HD3 because of the gapless playback of ATRAC files. I have been ripping my CD's in SonicStage to ATRAC Lossless 352kbps. However, when I play the files back on the player, I am getting a brief interruption between tracks. I have also tried ripping directly to ATRAC3plus 352 (i.e. not lossless, to see if the problem may have been with extracting the lossy portion of the lossless file). I have also tried ripping the CD's to .wav using Exact Audio Copy and then converting them to ATRAC files, but I had the same results. All files ARE playing without gaps in SonicStage (CP 4.2), but not the player. I am not converting my files from mp3 or some other format that isn't natively gapless. Has anyone heard of this issue? Is this particular model not truly gapless? The gap is certainly less than with mp3 files, but present all the same. I haven't been able to make it work gaplessly.

Any help is appreciated.

Edited February 12, 2007 by dougsing

[Guest Stuge]

Welcome to Atraclife!

1.To play Gapless the source should be gapless as well .

2.Cd should be ripped in one go .

[navsimpson]

Hmmm... I just tried playing some gapless tracks on my NWHD3 and it worked fine - no hiccoughs at all. I don't really know what to tell you. Are the CDs originals? And also, is SS converting the tracks to another bitrate when you transfer? Other than that, I'm not at all sure why it would be doing that.

-Nav

[dougsing]

THanks for the welcome Stuge!

I did manage to figure it out. I think there must have been a problem with my old plextor. I dropped in a new Plextor DVD and it seems to be resolved with direct rips at least.

I'm having mixed success with transcoding my previous FLAC files. I convert from FLAC to WMA Lossless using dBpoweramp and then convert the WMA Lossless files to ATRAC. That way I can keep my tags. I let you know what I find out in terms of the best way to do it while maintaining gapless. There surely is a way without having to resort to wav files.

dougsing

[allhands]

THanks for the welcome Stuge!

I did manage to figure it out. I think there must have been a problem with my old plextor. I dropped in a new Plextor DVD and it seems to be resolved with direct rips at least.

I'm having mixed success with transcoding my previous FLAC files. I convert from FLAC to WMA Lossless using dBpoweramp and then convert the WMA Lossless files to ATRAC. That way I can keep my tags. I let you know what I find out in terms of the best way to do it while maintaining gapless. There surely is a way without having to resort to wav files.

dougsing

Doug,

I've been having the same problem with my player.

I'm also assuming you need to convert the mp3 to a wav and then convert the wav to ATRAC lossless.

I haven't tried it yet, but it seems like it might work. Let me know if you figure anything out and I will do the same.

Thanks!

Edited February 15, 2007 by allhands

[dougsing]

Unfortunately, for the most part it isn't possible to get gapless playback from an mp3 file, even after converting it to a wave file. Because information is lost in lossy compression (mp3, ogg, wma, etc) the frames aren't perfectly maintained which causes problems with true gapless playback. This is a problem unique to most LOSSY compression schemes, and this information cannot be recovered. ATRAC files however have information in the header that identify the exact frames for the start and end of the file and was designed from the beginning with minidisc to be gapless.

LAME has recently added this information to encoded files, but it requires LAME compatibility with playback that SonicStage doesn't have. Thus, Sonicstage won't use this information when converting to ATRAC format or to wave and thus the wave file is not the same as the original wave before mp3 endcoding. The HD3 (or other sony plyers I'm aware of like the HD3), also don't have this specific compatibility with LAME encoded files. For the most part Foobar is your best bet for playing back recent LAME encoded mp3's gaplessly on the PC (though that doesn't help you on the portable front or existing non-lame encoded mp3's). Hydrogen audio has several good discussions on the topic of gapless playback, although they only cover open formats, so ATRAC isn't really covered there.

LOSSLESS files (FLAC, ape, WMA lossless, etc) are a different story. They are simply like a zip file for music and no music is actually lost. Therefore, it is possible to get gapless playback from these files so long as they were all ripped together. With these formats it is possible to convert to wav and then to ATRAC lossless and will retain their gapless playback.

There really is no benefit to converting your mp3s to ATRAC other than the bit of batter life improvement on your player. In fact, the HD3 cannot play back the ATRAC lossless file, but rather uses the compressed version inside the full ATRAC lossless file. THerefore any files convereted from mp3 to ATRAC Lossless, will have been compressed in a lossy way 2X and will result in further quality degradation. Also, remember, converting your mp3's to ATRAC lossless won't improve the quality, but just make them bigger in size, so your best bet is leaving your mp3s as they are and importing them into sonic stage. That is what I have done with my mp3s.

My problem had been related to CD's I ripped within sonicstage to ATRAC lossless, or with another program directly to wav files and then encoded with SonicStage.

I hope this is helpful.

Edited February 15, 2007 by dougsing

[allhands]

Thanks doug! This definitely helps a lot.

[maggior]

THanks for the welcome Stuge!

I did manage to figure it out. I think there must have been a problem with my old plextor. I dropped in a new Plextor DVD and it seems to be resolved with direct rips at least.

I'm having mixed success with transcoding my previous FLAC files. I convert from FLAC to WMA Lossless using dBpoweramp and then convert the WMA Lossless files to ATRAC. That way I can keep my tags. I let you know what I find out in terms of the best way to do it while maintaining gapless. There surely is a way without having to resort to wav files.

dougsing

This won't work. You will only get gapless when you do a direct rip of the CD or convert from wave. It's unfortunate and annoying that in the process you lose the tags. You must also ensure that the tracks are in the proper order when you encode to ATRAC otherwise the transitions between tracks will not be correct and you may get gaps or quick bursts of another song during the transition.