Alright, I know this has all been talked about before, but I thought I'd bring it up again for no useful purpose.

Since as of 2.0 we supposeldy no longer have to worry about the Empeg adding gaps bewteen songs, we now only have to worry about the gaps that are actually encoded into the music files. Since the wonderful folks at the Motion Picture Experts Group decided that each frame would contain exactly 1152 samples, there's no way to encode MP3 files properly. (Thanks, MPEG. ) The possible solutions I've seen so far include:

1. Use WAV (or other direct PCM encoding) files
   
2. Remove the offending MP3 frames
   
3. Use the gapless option to LAME
   
4. Use Ogg Vorbis files
   
5. Prompt the player to ignore the silence
   

The problems with these solutions are:

1. Using lossless encodings will end up ``wasting'' probably about 80-90% of the hard drive space
   
2. This solution exists in tfabris's GapKiller, but I find that the ``skip'' that results is as annoying as the gap -- perhaps more so.
   
3. As of this post, gapless only works on CBR mp3s
   
4. This would be a great solution, as Ogg Vorbis files don't have the fixed frame sample length problem, but the Empeg does not support it (yet?)
   
5. Another great solution except that the Empeg has no facility for this, either
   

I think that solution 1 is right out for the vast majority of us. Solution 2 can work for some folks and not for others, I'm sure. I would love to use Ogg Vorbis files, but I'm not holding my breath for an implementation to be available really soon. And as for solution 3, I'd personally prefer to use VBR. But there already exists a way to mark the end of silence on an mp3 file in the ID3v2 spec in the ETCO tag (§4.5). Now, I'm pretty sure that ID3 tags are not copied to the Empeg, but some sort of metadata must be, as Title, Artist, etc. are. Maybe there's space to put in a timecode for when to switch to the next track. Of course, all of this cannot be done right now, but it seems to be the most transparent, compact, and technically feasible solution. Unfortunately, I've not even loaded a developer image on my Empeg yet, so I don't know if it's at all actually feasible to do this.

Anyone know if this is remotely reasonable or have further information to add?