Do you have an MP3 head unit that will play seamlessly through tracks without a slight pause between them? This is particularly noticable on dance albums etc. where the track change is not in a silence gap.

When burning the cd`s you can set the gap between songs ie 1 sec or 2 secs. Well i do with nero :P

Thats what I do when burning audio CD's (though it adjusts the gap on track 1 beacuse it cant do zero second interval between disc start and track start)

However, someone here (quite a few, actually) said MP3's were different.

mp3's do run different. I am not sure whether you will be able to eliminate the gap. most of the dance mixes I have seen in mp3 format have been turned into one long track due to this. With the pc you can get plugins for winamp to give seamless playback, but to do this it buffers the beginning of the next song so its queued ready when the other ends. I dont think you will find a head unit that can do that off a cd or dvd. Possible you might find that ones that have a built in hard drive might be able to, but again I could be wrong.

The only way I've found to eliminate the gap is burn the MP3s as one long track. With Audio files (wav?) you can alter the gap to 0 seconds, but on an MP3 the comp just sees it as a data file, and automatically chucks a 2 second gap in. I might scour the instructions for my Pioneer to see if there's a setting to eliminate this on the radio, but I doubt it. :(

It does ruin a good CD to have a 2 second gaps every 3 or 4 minutes in what is meant to be a seamless "mix" of music.

Thanks, Gav. I did wonder why some dance albums I'd aquired from the web were one MP3 track for the whole CD.

MP3 the only way to eliminate the gap is if the headunit was to have some RAM onboard.

It would be playing the current song (From RAM) and preload the next song or a portion of it into RAM). Then when it reaches near the end of one track it would either crossfade to the next if you asked for that or jump straight onto it by starting decoding it before the last song is finished so it's all ready.

Isn't that hard, but would require memory onboard and I would doubt many people whill bother with the microprocessor or similar required to do this.

Only way to find out is to try it, but a cheap one almost certinaly won't.

I built a board with 8MB RAM that did just this, but it's a right pain to do well.

The unit I've been offered is a JVC single DVD head unit. Looks like a normal CD head unit but takes DVD's so you can get a lot of tunes on there. RRP is £189 so I wouldnt say its a cheap one.

If it reads direct from the DVD then no chance.

The thing would need to read teh DVD into memory, so have at least 4/8MB onboard and a more powerful microprocessor or extra DSP to do the crossfade or decode before the last track is finished playing.

If i had to guess i'd say you won't find many that will, but as said only way to try is burn a disk and take it for a spin.

Al of my dance/trance/funky house MP3' are downloaded as one long track.

But it can be tedious when you want to skip to a particular bit.

I am tempted just to buy CD's now tbh...

Mine does gapless fairly well. There is a tiny, miniscule gap of a split second, but nothing that detracts from Pink Floyd or Cassetteboy.

It will have a small buffer then to pre-load the data from the DVD ahead of time, however that will still never provide totally gapless :(

Goochie,

I think I mentioned this in one of the head unit threads. The "mp3" format is inherently flawed when it comes to gapless playback although certain hardware and software is better at minimising the silent gap.

The reason is due to the frames that are used to create each mp3 file. Any music that doesn't fill the duration of the last frame will have silience. Many mp3 players, stand alone, PC application, head units etc. do have a memory buffer to help prepare the playback of the next track but they will never eliminate the gap completely for each and every track.

When researching my choice of head unit three years ago I found Kenwood to be the best head unit manufacturer and Sony the worst for the length of gap between tracks. This was irrespective of the cost of the unit as the top end Sony model was worse than the low end Kenwood model. I don't know about JVC but you should definitely test it out.

This link may help to explain the problem in more detail although it deals with mp3 players such as the iPod -

http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players

Personally the gap annoys me too, although it is bearable with the Kenwood unit and depending on how good the track markings were made, the gaps can be seemless. I DJ and make a lot of house and trance mixes so it annoys me when I listen to my recordings in the car and hear the annoying gaps.

If you're that bothered by it, burn all your mixed music onto normal CD-Audio and save the mp3's for general music.

Depending on how the circuit is designed it might allow you to crossfade down a track and then up to the next rack so you get some quiet rather than silence.

But yes framing will be the problem.

MP3 is a very poor formate, ogg or aac are much better but ogg isn't as well supported even though it is totally free and and AAC well has some of the MP3 issues, but much higher quality.

I ended up by merging all the tracks in to one using the audio functions on nero and the audiance head unit will load a huge file eg pink floyd's Pulse live both disks , nearly 2 1/2 hours worth of music. sampled at 128 kps

This does seem to be the only solution sadly. Just means instead of skipping a bit you don't like you have to hold the skip button down to go through around 4 minutes of music when you hope its being mixed into the next tune. :speaker:

I can agree with the statement about sony's mp3 gap - I have a £450 (at the time although only paid £300 online) sony cd/tuner and can confirm that the mp3 gap is pathetic.

I rarely use the mp3 capabilities due to this as most of my music is dance albums that are mixed so I tend to fill my 10 disc changer with these and use the in dash one for generic albums or mp3.

Shame really as it's a nice unit apart from that.

Good to know it's not just mine though, even if it's one of the worst offenders....................

Matt