Gapless, from what I understand, is hard to do with MP3. It has to do with how the audio frames are constructed. If I understand correctly, the server has to monkey around and fill in the last frame or frames of the prior song with the first frames of the next, and I gather that process is error-prone. MP3 is *designed* for single tracks, so adding in gapless playback is a hack.
This is the biggest reason I use CUE with a single FLAC file for my library. Slimserver deals very nicely with this format. It guarantees gapless playback, because the entire CD is ripped as a single image. When I need individual files for MP3 players, I use Foobar2K under Windows; it works beautifully with CUE/FLAC. Its mass extraction/conversion engine is the best I've seen on any platform, period. It'll convert pretty much anything to anything, it'll do a giant library all at once, and it will take advantage of all the cores you want to throw at it. I do this as a two stage process; first I drag my music directories onto Foobar (it'll recurse an entire hierarchy at once) and have it compress to a single directory. This dumps all the MP3s in the same folder, with a number in front based on where they were in the playlist, which guarantees that all filenames will be unique. (You'd be surprised, for instance, just how many artists put Winter Wonderland as the third track in their Christmas albums. :)) It takes awhile to finish compression; on my quad-core Kentsfield, I compress VBR LAME at about 100x, but most machines are a lot slower. Once it's done, I clear the playlist and drag the new MP3 folder onto Foobar. I tell it to do a mass rename based on tags. This rebuilds the original directory hierarchy and sorts all the files into their proper places. It's nearly instant. This is the best way I've found to manage a library... by storing CUE/FLAC images, you can generate any other format you need with very little effort. -- Malor ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Malor's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1961 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31433 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
