Is it too much to hope?
I’ve just installed version 7 of iTunes, and for the last few minutes, the status window has been listing all the music in my library along with the words, “Determining Gapless Playback Information.”
This has been my biggest problem with digital music players for years. The MP3 format in particular has poor granularity. The files are limited in length to increments of something like two-tenths of a second. So playing one next to another inevitably leads to a pause between the songs. For many albums or shuffle play this is hardly noticable, but for “album rock” where one song flows seamlessly into the next, or live music, or any number of other common applications, this gap is a very noticable annoyance.
I’ve griped for years that this would be a very easy problem to fix. All that would be necessary is to add some metadata to the file telling it where to cut off. A 24-bit number would provide for track lengths up to more than four and a half hours in increments of thousandths of a second. Instead the makers of digital music players (both portable and desktop versions) have let us live with this gap between songs that quite frankly ruins certain albums. The best Apple had done up until yesterday was introduce a half of a second of crossfade between adjacent tracks. Somewhat better, as the gap is not audible, but the missed beat in music that’s supposed to flow seamlessly from track to track is still jarring.
I’m now waiting for this “gapless playback information” to finish updating. It may be too much to hope for, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that iTunes has finally risen to 1983 standards of digital audio.
