I've just discovered the Empeg car player and I am so stoked. I have wanted this kind of thing for a while. I have a pretty specific question about a need that I have. I am looking for the player to play MP3 tracks back to back without gaps between tracks. I have tons of "continuously mixed" CDs that, when listened to with gaps, get really annoying. I have set up an MP3 Server Box (see www.mp3sb.org) and it has the damn gaps, and I've gotten to hate it so much that I never use it. I'd hate to buy the empeg and have the same problem.

Does anyone know if this is a problem for the Empeg??

Thanks in advance!

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Gaps are usually a result of the way in which the mp3's were encoded in the first place. It usually doesn't have much to do with the play back software/hardware. I believe our own Tany Fabris has made a program that handles gaps in the tracks, but you may want to look into how you are encoding your mp3's.

DiGNAN

There are two issues here.

Firstly, an encoder will insert blank gaps at the start and end of a track, which can last anything from 1/32nd of a second to maybe a quarter of a second in some cases. You can trim these with an MP3 editor utility - tfabris is a bit of an expert at this, and will no doubt provide a link to some suitable software.

The second issue is with the player itself. Even properly trimmed MP3 files can have a tiny gap at playback, due to a number of issues within the software. This shouldn't exceed 1/32nd of a second, but it is audible - just. I listen to a lot of mixes and I don't find it so severe as to be a real bother.

Rob

Does anyone know of an encoder that doesn't place gaps, or has an option to turn them off or change the amount of gap time? I have used both Real Jukebox Plus and Audio Catalyst. I prefer VBR/160kbps so an encoder that can do that is imporatant too.

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Sorry, forgot about the playback part.

Anyway, Tony's program, called Gap Killer, would probably do the trick, but I don't know much about it. You can find the program at his web page (http://www.jps.net/tfabris/).

I happen to use Audiocatalyst to do my encoding but I don't listen to any continuos mixes so I can't really tell you how well it is capable of doing.

DiGNAN

Man, I've got you guys trained well. Thanks for filling in!

And as a follow up:

I have yet to find an encoder that doesn't artificially insert a partial frame of silence at the beginning of a track...

I happen to use Audiocatalyst to do my encoding but I don't listen to any continuous mixes so I can't really tell you how well it is capable of doing.

...Including the Xing encoder that ships with AudioCatalyst, it has the same problem as all the others. I actually e-mailed Fraunhofer and asked about this once, and they basically said it's the nature of the data compression and there really isn't a way around it. I don't understand the underlying details of the data compression algorithm, so I'm not clear on exactly why this is necessary. If anyone finds an encoder that fixes this problem, let me know.

And the problem with the end of a track is that the frames are all a fixed timespan, and if the end of a track doesn't fall on the end of a frame, then you get a partial silent frame at the end, too.

There are a few theoretical ways around this problem, though:

1) Player software could be written to pre-decode the end and beginning of a song pair, then detect the silence and slide the wave data sections together so that they play back seamlessly. Not a trivial task, I haven't seen anything which does this. Even the gapless playback plug-in for WinAmp simply streams the songs together as-is, so if the source MP3s have partially silent frames, then the output of the plug-in will have the silence, too.

2) You could encode your entire album as one huge MP3 file, then use a utility like MP3split to slice it up into sections. A lot of work, but definitely do-able. And the results would be perfect.

3) My solution, as noted before, is to rip the album normally, then hand-trim frames and do trial-and-error previewing until the gaps sound OK. Far from perfect, but better than nothing.

When Hugo demoed the Mark2 prototype for me, he had a techno mix on the empeg that sounded like it was playing perfectly seamlessly to me. I don't know how he created the files, but I'm guessing it was with a method similar to (2) above, which made them sound so good. Also, the nature of the music (very rhythmic) was such that even if there were gaps, I might not have been able to hear the gaps.

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Tony Fabris

How can you do this, I have thought of using this method a few weeks back, but I can't find a proggram that will rip multiple tracks off a CD into 1 file.

Well, I never actually tried it, but the two rippers I'm familiar with (AudioCatalyst and WinDac32) allow you to manually set the start and end points of each track in sectors or mm:ss format. I just figured you'd tell it that track 1 goes from 00:00 to 74:00 and let it rip.

Another option (in case that doesn't work) would be to rip the tracks individually as .WAV files (don't encode them yet), in which case you could definitely use an audio editor such as CoolEdit to splice them all together into one huge .WAV file and then encode that.

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Tony Fabris

Just speak to Paulway, he seems to be the guru on encoding large files (4 hours?)

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Murray

"2) You could encode your entire album as one huge MP3 file, then use a utility like MP3split to slice it up into sections. A lot of work, but definitely do-able. And the results would be perfect."

Where would I be able to find mp3split?

Thx
Sean

Where would I be able to find mp3split?

Um, good question. I could have sworn there was a piece of software with that name, but it doesn't turn up in any web searches.

If you wanna be the first to write one, here are the specs for the MP3 frame headers...

Or you could poke around MP3.com's software listings and see if there's a utility with the same functionality but a different name.

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Tony Fabris

I've found a program to split mp3's. Haven't tested it but the description says: Split MP3 files regardless of the size.
You can find it here.

(Post me if the link doesn't work)

TeeMcBee

Cdparanoia, a Linux ripper, rips the whole CD in one chunk by default (but is, of course, capable of ripping track-by-track or just segments of tracks). It is also, as the name implies, quite paranoic about sync errors, scratches etc: it rips anything (including badly skipping CDs), but slowly.



Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
#5196

CDCopy (I can't remember a URL, but Google tells me it's [link]www.cdcopy.sk[/link]) used to allow you to rip multiple tracks as one file. It's been ages since I used it, since it was a little temperamental.

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

I think it's available at www.download.com, too. Have had it. But MusicMatch and others are more comfortable to me.

TeeMcBee

Don't bother w/ mp3 split - it doesn't work right.. Most of my files that i've quick-split have tended to have a loud pop between songs...

I'm curious.. I use Audiocatalyst, which people are saying places a gap between songs... Yes, I hear just the slight hint of a gap when playing through the empeg (barely noticible, and only because I'm listening for it..), but playing through Apollo (which is gapless), or with Winamp with the gapless plugin, I can't hear a gap! This led me to believe that audiocatalyst was doing gap-less by default, but now others are saying that it does place a gap...

Does the winamp plugin automatically remove this? I can't hear it!
-mark


...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

Does the winamp plugin automatically remove this? I can't hear it!

I don't know which plug-in you're using. In theory, you could write a plug-in that removes gaps even if there's a lot of silence encoded into the files, but the one I'm using doesn't do that.


Yes, I hear just the slight hint of a gap when playing through the empeg (barely noticible, and only because I'm listening for it..)

Keep in mind that my definintion of a "gap" is incredibly strict. It's probably the nature of the music I listen to- the transitions between songs on Pink Floyd albums usually happen during smooth parts of the songs with long sustained notes. The gap, in that instance, sounds like a skipping vinyl LP: there's a distinct "pop" between the first and second song.

Now, if you're listening to highly rhythmic music (like techno), and the gap falls between beats, then you're not going to hear it, even if it's there.


This led me to believe that audiocatalyst was doing gap-less by default, but now others are saying that it does place a gap...

Not in my tests. AC does the same thing that all other encoders do. It inserts a random amount of silence at the beginning of the first frame, then pads the last frame with silence depending on where the last sample falls.

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Tony Fabris