Gapless playback is a lot easier than people make it out to seem. However, gapless playback will not kill what some people perceive to be a gap. Frame aligning, etc. are all methods that will probably still fall short of duplicating the layout of the originals on the CD (remember that's a spiral medium where the laser just keeps playing as if you're still reading a single track). A slight pop or a bit of missing sound often isn't a case of playback, but rather the material in the file being played. Some rippers will rip extra amounts of data. Or pad with some blank space. If you have an overlap in meterial from one track to the other, then playing it back gapless can cause an audible glitch. Same goes for encoding.

For a complete "gapless" playback without the need for optimal controls in making the tracks, you'd probably be best off with a cross-fader.

The empeg plays back some of my continuous songs right now without any gap or pop. And using a good cross-fader in Winamp with some tuning gives back completely seamless playback of any continuous albums.

I'd really love a quality cross-fading implementation with a few settings for the empeg. It works really well with tunes that aren't supposed to be seamless. :)

Bruno