robert taylor said:

"--nogap is the same as making one big mp3 file with the encoder and then splitting it youself on mp3 frame bounderies. --nogap has one extra nicety in that it will reset the bitreservoir at track bounderies, so the first frame of all the mp3 files will be valid when played back by itself.

For nogap to work in a player with a play list of the 10 mp3 files, the player just needs to not reset the encoding engine between each mp3 file. (and hope that the sample rate and number of channels is not changing from one mp3 file to the next). If you add tags (id3 or vbr header) the decoder also has to have the logic to look for and remove these tags when going from one mp3 file to the next. So a simple "gapless plugin" which just sends the playlist to the decoder as a single mp3 stream will decode the vbr headers as 20ms of silence."