From: Andreas Stemmer <Andreas.Stemmer_at_web.de>
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 16:30:42 +0200

> Linus,
>
> Could you point out where I can find more documentation on this? I
> listen to a lot of progressive music and the gaps, however small, can
> really disrupt my listening experience. I use LAME with the r3mix
> options for encoding.

I'm not Linus, but this is the way it worked for me:
if you encode each track on its own, the mp3 encoder adds some silence
at the beginning of the first frame and at the end of the last frame.
This causes the small gaps you hear. To avoid this, you can use the
-nogap option of lame. I use Exact Audio Copy to rip my cds and EAC
passes the wav-files directly to the LAME encoder, that's why the -nogap
option won't work here.
Instead I do the following: I extract the whole cd as one big file and
get one big mp3-file plus a cue-sheet for the title information (EAC
does this all). Because my mp3s are vbr, I usually correct the
vbr-header to make sure I have correct seeking information (with vbrfix
or Mp3TagStudio). I don't know why, but sometimes, lame created wrong
vbr-headers for me. The I use a tool called MusiCutter to split the big
mp3 at frame boundaries according to the cue sheets. You simply open the
mp3 and the cue sheet and MusiCutter does the rest, including correct
tagging. Now you have one mp3 for each track which fit together
perfectly. Another vbrfix for all the new mp3s makes sure to have
corrected seek information for the cutted files.
Sounds a bit complicated, but it isn't. All programs are freeware.

BTW: One question: Rockbox plays these files gapless because it puts the
frames together and decodes afterwards, but WinAmp and other Windows MP3
players decode the files and put them together after decoding which
produces gaps again. Does anybody know a MP3 player for windows which
does it the same smart way as rockbox?

Andreas Stemmer
Received on 2003-05-28