I thought the best way to get rid of the gaps could be an encoder front-end, that sends the WAV-files through the encoder as ONE stream, and then splits the single resulting MP3-file into the individual tracks again....this should create perfect and gapless MP3s.
Has anybody seen a software doing this ?

Yes, I do. Well, sort of.

As was mentioned elsewhere, the bit reservoir gets in the way on playback. I'm interested in messing with the new version of LAME when they get the nogap stuff working well.

Anyway, what you're talking about is creating a single huge rip of the entire CD, then splitting the resulting huge MP3 into smaller sections after it's been encoded.

Right now, I don't know of any software which does that "automatically", but you can do it yourself in two separate steps.

First, do the "big rip". Most ripping software lets you adjust the start/end points of the tracks before ripping. So de-select all but one track, and adjust its start/end points to match the beginning and end of the CD. For instance, in Audiocatalyst, you do this by unchecking all of the tracks except the last one, getting the properties of the last track, and adjusting its start point to 00:00. Then rip it.

So now you've got one huge track that represents the entire CD.

Now load up the latest version of my GapKiller software. Right now my regular web site address is down (I HATE MY ISP!) but you can temporarily get it from http://pweb.jps.net/~tfabris.

There is a feature in this new version that lets you split up a large MP3 into many small MP3s. Enter the track times from the original album. Preferably the times you got from AudioCatalyst (or whatever ripper you were using), as the album sleeve might not be correct.

That should do it. Now you have MP3s made in the way you suggested.

However, this is still not perfect, as the playback software might or might not Do The Right Thing with timing and with the bit reservior at the track transition points. You might still get a minor glitch at track switches. Remember that it's a two-sided coin: To get truly gapless playback, you need both the encoder and the playback software cooperating.

So until LAME gets that stuff working well, and playback software is designed to play back those kinds of files, it's still a hit-and-miss business.

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Tony Fabris