There is now a true solution to the Gapless Playback problem.

I wanted to post this yesterday, but needed to spend more time testing to be sure it actually works.

The problem with getting gapless playback lies in the MP3 format itself, which pads the final frame of each song with silence in order to have all the frames be the same size. However... the codec ignores silence at the beginning of a song, most likely as an accommodation for the tag information.

So, here's how to do true Gapless Playback:

1) Open your PC and connect a 3.3v Lithium Ion battery across pins 12 and 22 of the system's RAM bus, and disconnect those pins from the PC's power supply. This will preserve your RAM state even when powered down. At this time, load your normal ripping/encoding software, then power down the computer. The Lithium Ion battery will keep your program running.

2) Put 6 amp capacity diodes in line with the AC power going to the PC's power supply, one facing + side in, the other facing + side out.

3) Connect the PC to a 240 volt power suppply; the diodes will block half of the incoming power, reducing it to 120 Volts, and reversing the polarity of the power. This will cause the hard drive spindle motors to turn in opposite the normal direction of rotation.

4) Rip and encode your songs as usual -- and they will be written to your hard drive backwards because of the reversed direction of the drive spindle motors. This cleverly places the silence at the beginning of the song rather than at the end. (Important! Do NOT play the music in this state, however, because you will be subjected to the Satanic messages that all rock and roll artists cleverly hide in their music!)

5) Restore your PC to its normal operation (remove the battery and the diodes, reconnect to 110V power) and using emplode (or Jemplode) load the reversed songs into your empeg player.

6) Now, put the player in your car. Then, reverse the cables on your car's battery, thus once again causing the spindle drive motors in the empeg to rotate in the opposite direction. Now, your songs will play back completely gapless.

One downside to this is that you cannot have any ID3 tags on your songs, as they will now be at the end of the song and will completely defeat the purpose of this technique. The other problem is... this only works on the 90th day of each year (91st day on Leap Years)

tanstaafl.