Hiya chaps, I am trying to put my cd collection onto my computer and was wondering what the best software is to use. I have been using Windows Media Player but if I put a dance cd on where all the songs mix in, it puts an annoying gap in between each song. Does anybody know if I can get rid of the gap or is there any other better software I can use without this annoying gap between songs ? Cheers for any help
If you don't need to play back the files you have extracted from your CDs on a portable/standalone device (in this case you'd have to use mp3) you should use Musepack (.mpc) format. It's gapless and best lossy format quality-wise - you'll get perfect (99.9... % of cases on high-end equipment and trained hearing) quality at ~170kbps (standard setting). For audio extraction use Exact Audio Copy (EAC). There are many threads on this forum about how to use both - you can find all information you need using the search function. A quick all-in-one guide about how to set up EAC to encode with musepack is http://www.rex-guide.de.vu If you're not concerned about quality that much you might want to use Ogg Vorbis as compression format.
Steinberg's WaveLab will let you rip to PC and also get rid of those annoying gaps you mention. It's an option in the dialogue. WaveLab also converts to MP3 using either Lame or Fraunhofer, at CBR or VBR. Well worth a look, although not cheap. Then again, what is cheap these days? It seems to me that if you want the quality, then you have to pay the money. OK, the job can be done using freeware/shareware, but it's always missing these little extras.
Gaps are a restriction of the mp3 format. To get rid of the completely you have to use another format or rip a whole CD to a single mp3 file (and use a CUE sheet for playback if you want to access the tracks directly) - With EAC you can do both (for free BTW).
In WaveLab 4 when you extract from CD there is an option to either include the 2 second gap or exclude it completely. It rips the CD to wave files, then you convert to MP3 fromthe internal dialogue.
We're talking about 2 different things. The 2 second gap aka pre-track is variable. Only before the 1st track of a CD it is always 2 seconds, before all other tracks it can be of any size. (Sometimes it's used for hidden bonus tracks.) Some audio extraction programs don't read these pre-track gaps and replace them by 2 seconds of silence, others cut it away if you tell them to. To get perfect results on live recordings you need a program that handles these gaps correctly (= reading them and appending them to the previous track). Exact Audio Copy is capable of this for example. MP3 as format is not gapless because - The length (= sample number) of a file must be a multiple of mp3 frame size, so if a file doesn't match (which happens in most cases) silence is added (= gap) - mp3 frames overlap, so starting a file at full volume from the 1st sample is a problem - mp3 encoders add some inaudible frames in the beginning of a file (e.g. VBR header) abused for carrying information e.g. about encoder used resulting in silent samples added during decoding. Gaps caused by mp3 format limitations are much shorter (usually < 0.5 seconds) than standard pre-track gaps. Try to encode a live recording (applause between tracks) with Wavelab to mp3, listen to the resulting mp3s and you'll know what I'm talking about.
