FLAC album files vs converted mp3 files / Gapless issue

[Chaz1952]

Hello. I'm new to the forum, but have been using the Ripper and Converter for several years.

I noticed today that specific a FLAC file ( Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young 1974) album of a live concert plays back perfectly gapless on foobar 2000 and my digital audio player.

However, the same album, converted to mp3 (Lame) on the Batch Converter has very noticeable gaps between the tracks on my DAP. Listening using iTunes on my PC the album plays gapless.

The gapless option is enabled on my music player and other FLAC files play gapless, so I don't really know what the issue may be.

Any suggestions or additional information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[Spoon]

Re: FLAC album files vs converted mp3 files / Gapless issue

mp3 is not a gapless format, your player would have to specifically decode mp3 gaplessly (such as foobar).

[garym]

Re: FLAC album files vs converted mp3 files / Gapless issue

As spoon notes, your PLAYER must support gapless with mp3. Not all do. foobar and itunes will (in the distant past, itunes/ipods did NOT handle gapless, but this was changed at some point). Your DAP likely does not support mp3 gapless playback.

[javabean505]

Re: FLAC album files vs converted mp3 files / Gapless issue

Regarding inter-track gaps in MP3 "song=track=file" format, I prepared a two-song playlist where the two songs blend into each other -- i.e., no gap in original CD format. I played the two tunes sequentially on foobar2000 (f2k), since garym said on 2018.06.24 that f2k and iTunes supported "gapless" playback. What I heard on f2k was a little "click" artifact as the decoder moved from the end of one file to the beginning of the next. No gap, just a small artifact. To double-check this behavior on another player, I performed the same test on the Windows Media Player v12.0 (wmp12). I found exactly the same behavior -- no gap, but the small "click". Sounded exactly the same as f2k. On a consumer-audio CD/MP3 player (Bose), the same two MP3 tracks contain a pronounced audible gap; I estimate it is about 200ms long.

My question, then, is whether the behavior observed on the two computer-based players (f2k and wmp12) is what counts as "gapless playback" -- or if anyone knows of any other decoder/player app or combination of apps that eliminates the inter-track latency artifact. (My suspicion is that the behavior described above is as good as it gets, but I'd like to be wrong.)

[garym]

Re: FLAC album files vs converted mp3 files / Gapless issue

Are you sure that there is no replaygain tag being used by foobar2000 player. Change in vol adjustment could cause the click you hear.