I record a lot of CD's on my PC's and then dump all or parts of them to my RIO Cali player. Since most CD's have 'gaps' between tracks the process is pretty easy. I haven't been able to find a way to record from CD when the cd flows from track to track. Let me correct myself, I can record, however a gap is created and breaks the flow, i.e. Pink Floyd's, "Dark Side of the Moon", Queensrÿche's, "Operation Mindcrime", or almost any live cd. I tend to like these types of recordings and while the gap isn't the end of the world, it disrupts my listening pleasure. My initial thought is that this would become one large MP3 or WMA file(?) Maybe I've got the capability in some of the software I already have; if I have, I can't find it. I've had a hard time with searches because I can't seem to come up with the right words to describe my request. I didn't find this topic in the forum archives, but if it is a repeat I apologize. Any ideas? Thank You
For gapless playback on PC use - lame for encoding mp3s, e.g. with ExactAudioCopy (EAC) to rip; for a guide see afterdawn's guides section. For recommendable switches/quality settings see sticky thread in this forum. - foobar2000 for playback. It recognises and uses the information about encoding offsets stored by lame in the mp3 file necessary for gapless playback. AFAIK there's some 3rd party input plugin for winamp that can do the same. - Or use some other natively gapless format in PC environment like musepack or mp4/m4a To create one big mp3 from a whole CD you can use EAC -> "Extract to image (compressed)". It's possible to split the resulting big mp3 using the .cue created with EAC with mp3directcut to separate .mp3 files. With many players these mp3s will contain very small gaps/glitches only, mainly caused by overlapping frames and/or messed up bit reservoir. These gaps can even be reduced by using --nores switch on encoding. It disables bit reservoir and might reduce quality noticably, especially if you're using CBR. Additionally, you can remove one frame manually from the end of each track in mp3directcut. When playing back with software players like winamp, there should be almost no audible gap/glitch anymore. With hardware players like your RIO it depends on the player's capabilities. Some players introduce gaps, no matter what you do. In such a case you have to use big single .mp3 files indeed. (To acess single tracks from whole-album-mp3s directly you can use the .cue created by EAC with capable players like foobar2000: simply drag'n'drop the .cue to playlist and the tracks will appear and play separately, but still play without gaps.)
Thank you Tigre, Your knowledge overwhelms me. I hope it rains this weekend so I'll have an excuse to stay in and play. John
