I-POD, help!!!

If you have neither of those connections on your computer (assuming you have a PC), you'll have to buy an adapter card. I bought a FireWire one for my machine, but they have USB ones as well. I think it was around 20-30 bucks.

it's an iPod

and you are fucked, are you using a tandy 2000?

I used to have a 5-gig iPod. Basically, that was fine too. i just swapped playlists occasionally for some variety.

Do these things add a pause or a jump betweeen tracks that are supposed to segue instantly (in no gap) on the CD version,?

Cos my Sony MP3 CD player does and I hate it!

(Anyone got any opinions on the new sony HD MP3 player, V3? iPod battery life is useless :-(

"Many music CDs contain songs that blend into each other, and importing them to iTunes may create a small gap between songs that interrupts the flow. If you use the iTunes Join Tracks feature, the program melds two or more songs into one, continuous gap-free track. So now you can enjoy listening to classical music, concept rock albums and extended dance mixes without the silent treatment."

does this transfers to iPods during playback?

That just ruins so many albums :-~(

WTF??!?!?!?

Even Windows Media Player _nearly doesn't mess up inter-track.

:-(

WHY HAS NO ONE MENTIONED THIS BEFORE???

plus, back in the day when disks were small enough that every kilobyte counted, there was a difference between formatted size and unformatted size. IIRC a 360kb floppy disk didn't give you 360kb as such. i imagine this is still the case.

-- grimly fiendish (simonmai...), January 13th, 2005.

No, don't think so, no reason you couldn't re-construct the 44k/16bit digital audio stream and play them exactly next to each other, down to the microsecond.

Have you saved any files/contact info/loaded any other apps to the iPod? Cause that'll do it.

-- mei

If anyone has a way to fix this I'm all ears - it really fucks up the sounds of mix CDs, to the point where they're really not fun to listen to.

You can also use cue sheets and a couple other techniques to be able to see one big mp3 as multiple tracks in winamp, but to my knowledge there's no way to do it in iTunes yet, and I know there's no way to do it on an iPod. (More info here: http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusicclassical/mp3gaps.html)

I dont know wtf the problem is. In the last month or so my battery has turned into a piece of shit. Yesterday I listened to my ipod for two hours and I didnt get any response when I tried to listen to it during my lunch break. When this happened in the past I'd have to plug it back into a charger and it would do exactly what you just described, but it would eventually charge back up again. But fuck this 2 hour battery life bullshit.

did you you try the join thing on the new itunes software i mentioned upthread? seems this would take care of the breaks between tracks and allow track skipping.

I don't know that joining tracks actually does get rid of it, because once a song is converted to mp3 there's a gap at the beginning and/or end of it. Joining two songs that both have gaps built-in is still going to leave a gap just like burning them with "no gap" set for the CD. Unless that iTunes feature is designed to fix that very problem, I think you have to rip them as a single track in the first place. Or join them while they're still WAV or AIFF and then mp3 encode the resulting larger file.

-- john'n'chicago

I could be mistaken but I think this controls for iTunes only, not for the iPod -- it joins them if you're listening on your computer.

http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/

The problem with gapless in the mp3 encoding process rests with ID3 tags, which are either placed at the very beginning of the file (ID3v2) or the very end of the file (ID3v1). Much more info here:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mp3/chapter/ch02.html#71109

There's nothing that can be done about the (larger) gaps on the IPod; that's the shitty mp3 decoder. Gapless mp3 listening is possible only when the player supports buffer-ahead on track changing, i.e., when the decoder starts working on the next file and buffers it to the end of the file that's still playing on-the-fly. A lot of software players (like Winamp, frinstance) can do this. I don't think any of the hardware players can do it flawlessly.

That movie is many years out of date!

http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/service/battery.html

-Casey Neistat

CF CDs where simultaneous sounds are stored sequentially. Er, and in MP3s for that matter.

I already have a Sony MP3 etc CD player.
I never used ATRAC before because all my music files are .mp3 and Sony's software crashed when I installed it. Anyway, hey're a no skip option on ATRAC so I installed the Sony software on my work compter and burned 19 albums onto one CD, the software converting MP3-> ATRAC.

Guess what, no gaps!

Unfortunately the re-encoding has made the music sound lik a cassette walkman, bu I think that's just the de-code and re-encode process, next step is to go stright CD->ATRAC, see how that works.

I'm thinking Sony HD-3 thingy whe I get enough cash...