Hi folks,

I've been thinking a lot recently about the gapless playback issue. Now don't worry, I've searched the posts and so forth, so I know it's been bandied about before. I know from experience and theory that creating a set of gapless MP3 files can be tedious and painful---particularly if, as happens sometimes, the track boundaries defined by the source CD are not exactly correct and require manual editing.

Basically, here's my idea. It seems to me that the only way to insure perfect fidelity gapless playback of a single album is to encode the entire album as a single MP3 file. That's great, and of course empeg will have no problem with that if all I wanted to do was play the entire album.

But DAE programs like Exact Audio Copy and CDRWin can create "cue sheets" that go along with a full-album extraction that documents the gaps and track boundaries. (One thing that's nice about this is that, if you disagree with the track boundaries that the CD master chooses, you can just adjust the cue sheet instead of re-ripping the offending tracks.)

Certainly a system as flexible as the empeg could be configured to use these cue sheets in an intelligent way. What I envison is that, when presented with an album-size MP3 plus a cue sheet, the empeg would create a set of "virtual tracks" that for all intents and purposes function like normal tracks. When the user selects an individual track, it will know to read the cue sheet for the track position, then seek along the MP3 file to find it. Of course, when playing the entire album, it need not do any seeking, and of course it will sound like a continuous stream of music as intended.


I'm certainly not the only person to think of this; in fact, seeing
someone else's version of this idea inspired me to post here. And of course, the program CDRWin has been a popular tool for some time for, as they call it, "disk-at-once" (DAO) recording using cue sheets.

Comments? Ideas?

Michael
on the list for a mk2...