Ogg & Flac gapless encoding?(+ playback on Karma)

Hi all !

Tonight I thought I'd try something that I've been meaning to do for a long time : encode one of my mixed cd's with OGG Vorbis so that I could enjoy gapless playback.

But somehow, things didn't work out and the tracks are not at all gapless. I've tried playing the tracks with Winamp 2.x and my Karma. Both play VERY noticable gaps between the tracks.

I've got a feeling that I'm doing something wrong, but I can't think what it is...

This is what I did :

1) I ripped the mixed CD with exact audio copy. Alle the files were named correctly with CDDB. Good, saves me time later on.
2) I went to www.vorbis.org and downloaded the OGGDROP encoder. A very basic encoder but it does the job.
3) After all the files were encoded, I fired up the lastest version of Tag& Rename and tagged the file by using the filename as a source. Again, no problems here.

Then I uploaded the files to my Karma and listened to them. Soundquality is very good ! But they don't play gapless. At all ! (gaps of +/- 1sec) What am I doing wrong ?

Note : I've tried the same with FLAC too. And although Winamp playback comes very close, it still isn't completely gapless. Karma is not gapless AT ALL (gap of +/- 1 sec)

Thanks!

Soundquality is very good ! But they don't play gapless. At all !

This is fixed (for Ogg Vorbis) in the forthcoming 1.20 release of the Karma firmware. Flac has always played back gaplessly when I've tried it: what encoder did you use? Have you tried using Rio Music Manager itself to encode Flac?

Peter

This is fixed (for Ogg Vorbis) in the forthcoming 1.20 release of the Karma firmware.

Oh, this is very good news ! thanks!

Flac has always played back gaplessly when I've tried it: what encoder did you use? Have you tried using Rio Music Manager itself to encode Flac?

No, I used what I thought was the standard FLAC encoder found at this page. I haven't tried to encode via RMM. I didn't think this was necessary. Is it ?

Check EAC. If it is set to "Append Gaps to Previous Track" in the action menu, then the gaps could be from the original CD. For example, if there is a 2 second gap between songs 2 and 3 on a CD and you use EAC with the option above, then your encoded version of song 2 will have 2 seconds of silence at the end. If you then make a mix with that encoded song there will always be a 2 second gap after the song.

Thanks for your replie. I'll try that !
The CD I ripped was mixed by itself, hence there were no gaps (0 seconds) between the tracks.

But it might be possible that EAC adds those gaps by itself. I'll check it out.

Thanks!

Another note is that Winamp 2.x does not natively play back any digital audio format without gaps. You actually need to get a gapless playback plugin for it. I use an old one made by someone from the actual Winamp team. It's unsupported, but it works fine for me (with oggs, anyway).