Ha, here's another chance to voice the need for gapless MP3 transitions...

When you do split your MP3 files up, what you'll find if you play them back-to-back on a so-called "gapless" player is that it almost sounds gapless, but not quite. That's because MP3 frames are not totally independent of each other.

In order for truly gapless playback to work, the MP3 decoder must not only avoid inserting artificial spacde between tracks, but it must also avoid resetting its internal state between tracks---so that as far as it's concerned it will treat consecutive MP3 files as if they are one big file.

The degree to which this is noticeable varies from split to split, depending on the sounds occurring at the time. But I've definitely noitced it.

(Incidentally, because ID3v2 tags are stored as frames, I think that means you need to limit yourself to ID3v1 tags for the tracks as well.)

I'd really like to see this done in Empeg so that I can reliable encode entire albums, split them along MP3 frame boundaries, and know that the result will be indistinguishable from the original whenever I play the tracks consecutively.

Michael Grant
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