richter wrote:
I don’t believe that pushing the gapless issue is the beating of a dead horse… yet. It won’t be until Sansa abandons Clip+ firmware updates. It should be continued to be brought up while they are still updating firmware for the Clip+. The Sansa Clip+ was advertised to feature gapless playback, and gapless playback is noted as a feature in the user manual. Gapless was even mentioned in a lot of reviews by computer magazines, although every user that has tried to playback gaplessly has found that it doesn’t work properly. My take is that reviewers read that the Clip+ featured gapless playback in the manual, failed to verify it for themselves, and wrote that it worked in their reviews.
Gapless is not some additional feature that users were never promised, it was supposed to be functional on the Clip+ from the very beginning. While gapless may not be important for some, I think it is bad in general to leave customers hanging like they have thus far waiting for a feature that Sansa stated was functional right out of the box and with original firmware. In my opinion, to make the gapless issue into some kind of minor problem for fringe and obsessive customers is to not hold Sansa accountable for fixing the problem.
As far as a gapless workaround goes in the meantime, the best one that I’ve found is to just encode an album that requires gapless as one big audio file. You can search through the album with one of the front buttons and get to a particular song if need be, and the search function is pretty quick. Usually when I listen to an album like this on my Clip+, it’s during a time when I plan on listening to at least twenty minutes worth in one sitting without fiddling with it, so I tend not to be bothered with the inability to skip between songs on the album.
Bottom line is that if gapless matters to you, none of the audio formats you encode to will probably satisfy you, as you’re going to hear clicks or glitches between tracks no matter which one you choose.
@marvin_martian wrote:
My personal opinion on the whole gapless issue in general…
Message Edited by richter on 01-13-2010 06:25 PM
You have a fair point…it is in the manual , and this is the first Sansa that has claimed to be gapless. My dead horse analogy relates to having heard the whole gapless issue debated here and in other forums for a year and a half now, starting with the older players.
Your workaround procedure is one that has been brought up frequently throughout the debate…and it is a workaround that I have done myself in the past…works pretty well if you ask me.
The true believers in this debate, however, take offense to the suggestion and insist that they shouldn’t have to do this.
So the gapless music I have, I leave on the computer now, since usually on the go I am in shuffle all mode. When I sit here, I fire up Mediamonkey or WMP12, and listen to my gapless albums in glorious, gapless FLAC, with no worries about my battery life, etc. 
