Doing gapless with mp3 used to be hard, but with LAME encoded stuff it's
now pretty easy - just read the tag. Other formats are gapless, so the
infrastructure to do seamless transitions is there, all that needs
adding is the code to the firmware's mp3 decoder.

I'm aware it's an issue of priorities, and I'm aware that as a
non-contributor myself my voice is weaker, but I consider this a
significant issue. 

People coming over from other platforms frequently have large existing
libraries in mp3, and certain genres of music really require accurate
gapless playback (while others, of course, make no use of it). Being
able to answer "yes, the SB3 will playback your files as intended"
rather than "sure, just transcode to flac/rerip from cd/whatever"
strikes me as a big selling point. 

As for the issue of whether people who care about gapless would still
use mp3 - you betcha. For me it's not about getting total fidelity,
it's about not having one of the most important part of the album (the
track transitions) destroyed. If you listen to mixed music, as many
people do, having a gap in there is like having someone hit you with a
frying pan every 5 minutes. 

Case in point, for the last 2.5 years I've used an increasingly
scratched up and flaky Rio Karma as my portable device for the sole
reason that plays Vorbis gapless. Yesterday I bought an iPod because
Apple finally realised gapless matters. I would never have bought my
first SB if it didn't do gapless from at least Vorbis & FLAC - and if I
had a large mp3 library at the time (I didn't) I'd have wanted that to
be gapless too.


-- 
radish
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radish's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=77
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=27384

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