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2) Hand-trim frames off of the beginning and end of your existing mp3 files to remove the silent bits. This requires some trial-and-error to find the right number of frames to trim. This is what GapKiller does.

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Tony,

I believe that it's this second method that is the reason you may be getting only 90% effectiveness with your gapless playback instead of 100%. The problem is that these "silent" frames can actually contain information necessary to fully decode previous or following frames (I can't remember which). So trimming away the silent frames may cause you to lose some of audible information. The degree to which this matters will certainly depend on the source material. I've actually seen this audible information in otherwise silent MP3 frames by examining them with a hex editor.

As far as I know, your first technique is the only one that can be guaranteed to preserve all the musical content:

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1) Rip your entire album as one huge song into one single MP3 file. Then use a splitter utility to cut up the MP3 at song boundaries. My GapKiller program includes just such a splitter utility.

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But of course, I don't yet know if the new empeg decoder handles MP3 file boundaries in a fashion which will preserve this cross-file musical information.

Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266