I sit corrected. 
I have personal experience with the Cowon and Apples (my son has an iTouch, my best friend has a Nano and another friend of mine has a S9 - lucky sod) but only reports on the Zune.
Thanks for the clarification.
Oh c’mon guys - no technical nitpicking over what is “truly gapless”. How many owners of portable MP3 players really care if it is “trully” gapless - as long as it lets one song run approximately smoothly into another I doubt many care if it is technically perfect
And to the people who kindly replied to me, yes I know I can merge individual MP3s into one long one - I just hoped it wasn’t necessary, but it seems it might be. Am I bothered enough to actually do it? No - probably not, but it was worth asking the question, and at least it adds one more name to the list of people who would like to have this feature - should it ever be possible in future
@roj wrote:
I sit corrected.
I have personal experience with the Cowon and Apples (my son has an iTouch, my best friend has a Nano and another friend of mine has a S9 - lucky sod) but only reports on the Zune.
Thanks for the clarification.
I guess I should clarify as well. I can only speak of the pre-HD Zunes. Both of my Zunes, 1 flash, 1 hard-drive model, act the same way as far as gapless. No gap, per se, just not a completely smooth transition to the next song. Sometimes this manifests itself in a brief stutter, or a brief clicking sound…close to gapless, but not true gapless. I don’t know which is more annoying; the stutters, clicks or gaps! :smileyvery-happy:
The Cowon S9 and Apples, yes. iTouch, Nano, Classic. Between my son, my friends and my co-workers, we covered the lot. I had a Clip+ and took it back because the main reason I wanted it WAS gapless.
Message Edited by roj on 12-03-2009 01:17 PM
If you care about gapless, you nitpick.
End of story.
If you don’t, you won’t.
@donp wrote:
@roj wrote:
Only the Zune, Cowon S9 and Apple products are true gapless.
You’ve tested everything?
"
The Cowon S9 and Apples, yes. iTouch, Nano, Classic. Between my son, my friends and my co-workers, we covered the lot. I had a Clip+ and took it back because the main reason I wanted it WAS gapless.
"
You said only those are true gapless. That implies that no other player is, and that you have some way of knowing that. I’m just asking how?
@roj wrote:
If you care about gapless, you nitpick.
End of story.
If you don’t, you won’t.
Or, “if you care about gapless there is a good chance you’re listening to some good music”
Yeah, give me the not-so-true gapless of Clip+ or whatever and I’d still be happy. Come on, SanDisk!!!
I wholeheartedly agree. I mean, they can always keep refining it as a work in progress.
And they should.
Other than the now defunkt Rio Karma, I’ve never saeen any other vendor claim gapless and I’ve been looking diligently for that feature for four years.
Is iPod gapless for all MP3’s or only for LAME encoded ones? Someone on this forum cliamed non-LAME MP3 cannot be played truly gapless…
Correct. LAME improved the original specification years agoi. FhG and Xing don’t encode that way (who the hell uses that outdated ■■■■ today?).
roj wrote:
Correct. LAME improved the original specification years agoi. FhG and Xing don’t encode that way (who the hell uses that outdated ■■■■ today?).
I think FhG is the iTunes MP3 encoder…which goes to say that Apple would prefer you use AAC for everything. And Xing is just utter ■■■■.
@marvin_martian wrote:
@roj wrote:
Correct. LAME improved the original specification years agoi. FhG and Xing don’t encode that way (who the hell uses that outdated ■■■■ today?).
I think FhG is the iTunes MP3 encoder…which goes to say that Apple would prefer you use AAC for everything. And Xing is just utter ■■■■.
FhG was believed to be used in iTunes, but its actually not. Apple clarified that its a home made encoder. It does support gapless, but IIRC it does not write standard gapless tags, so you will not get gapless playback on non-Apple devices. It does understand LAME tags though, it just won’t create them.
IIRC rockbox can read the tags it writes on AAC files. I’m not sure about MP3s. Theres not a lot of Apple encoded MP3 files out there so its possible no one ever bothered to figure out how their stupid tag works.
So is FhG in light of LAME. And I would never ever under any circumstances whatsoever use iTunes. I refuse to pay lolless prices for lossy content, especially with DRM included.
That’s just stupid.
A home-made encoder from Apple. Be still my pounding petunia patch. Gee, I wonder if it’s another ripoff in the way that ALAC is a ripoff of FLAC (sarcastic tags). And if it isn’t, and is indeed made by Apple form scratch, well - that’s garbage right there.
roj wrote:
So is FhG in light of LAME. And I would never ever under any circumstances whatsoever use iTunes. I refuse to pay lolless prices for lossy content, especially with DRM included.
That’s just stupid.
for what it is worth itunes is drm free now
roj wrote:
So is FhG in light of LAME. And I would never ever under any circumstances whatsoever use iTunes. I refuse to pay lolless prices for lossy content, especially with DRM included.
That’s just stupid.
You can use the program without buying music from the service…many people with iPods simply rip CD’s with the iTunes program and then load their iPods. ANd as far as digital downloads,there aren’t many options for buying lossless content online, at least not yet. And as drlucky said, iTunes is DRM free now. But if you set the program to output MP3 instead of AAC, it’s not the greatest encoder…of course, the WMP MP3 encoder ■■■■■ too. :wink:
@saratoga wrote:
FhG was believed to be used in iTunes, but its actually not. Apple clarified that its a home made encoder. It does support gapless, but IIRC it does not write standard gapless tags, so you will not get gapless playback on non-Apple devices. It does understand LAME tags though, it just won’t create them.
IIRC rockbox can read the tags it writes on AAC files. I’m not sure about MP3s. Theres not a lot of Apple encoded MP3 files out there so its possible no one ever bothered to figure out how their stupid tag works.
AFAIK the Itunes encoded mp3’s don’t need tags in the file to play gapless on Ipods. The Ipod gets the info from the database written by Itunes.
@roj wrote:
FhG and Xing don’t encode that way (who the hell uses that outdated ■■■■ today?).
The current Xing is known as Helix, and last I saw was blind testing on a par (better for some things) with Lame.
