I listen to CD directly but I all rips I made for the CD that have gapless playback*, are also played gapless on my PC.
I would have noticed if there was a gap.
I simply rip and play with foobar2000, for what it’s worth.
I did nothing special to mark them as gapless.
This is why I’m wondering what’s the added value of a new information somehow.
* With music in several parts, things like Jean Michel Jarre, Mike Oldfield, or with live concerts.
A little bit later update
In fact I have ripped in FLAC and in MP3 (with LAME), through the Convert commands of foobar2000 with no particular setup.
I have searched a little and found out that fb2k will play lame mp3 and flac files gapless (among others). No setting is required. If you are playing mp3 files that are not lame mp3 files, fb2k won’t play gapless.
If I look at my FLAC files, they don’t contain any special metadata about gaps but still play without gaps.
If I look at my MP3 files, encoded with LAME, they contain two metadata (and maybe also the third) that may be the reason why foobar2000 plays LAME MP3 gapless.
Example of two consecutive gapless track data:
<ENC_DELAY> : 576 <ENC_PADDING> : 1452 <MP3_ACCURATE_LENGTH> : yes
<ENC_DELAY> : 576 <ENC_PADDING> : 1200 <MP3_ACCURATE_LENGTH> : yes
Here is data for a regular track with gap:
<ENC_DELAY> : 576 <ENC_PADDING> : 2136 <MP3_ACCURATE_LENGTH> : yes
The difference must be in the audio content, between ENC_DELAY
and ENC_PADDING
.
I could try to remove them and I guess I would hear gaps between tracks…
I have switched to Linux some months ago but have not listened to music from the PC yet to know what happens with something else than foobar2000, with these files (I mostly listen to PC music at work, Windows / foobar2000).