lame mp3's not completely gapless on 5G ipod

[70mustang]

Hi,

I bought an ipod 5G a few weeks back and decided to Rockbox it because the gaps between songs drive me nuts.  There was a big improvement with the gaps on my LAME 3.97b2 encoded mp3's but they are still not  compeltely gapless.  There is just a slight click or pop between tracks.  I tested some tracks encoded with ogg vorbis and those are completely gapless but I would like to stick with mp3.  Has anyone acheived perfectly gapless mp3's?  Could this just be an issue with the ipod port?

Thanks

[lalittle]

I'm using a 5G iPod with all LAME encoded mp3's (using JR Media Center), and they appear to be perfectly gapless on my iPod using Rockbox -- i.e. I've never heard any pops between tracks, and I've listenned carefully for this on several albums with both very loud and very quiet song transitions.  Gapless playback on my iPod was the primary reason I stared using Rockbox, so I have been fairly critical when listenning for this.  As far as I know, at least SOME of these songs used LAME 3.97b2, but some of them were encoded with LAME 3.96.1.

Do you "always" get the pops between tracks, or is it just on certain songs?  What bitrate do you use?  My tracks are all either CBR160, or VBR "standard" (roughly 200kbps.)

Larry

[70mustang]

I've only tested one album, The Wall, but it happens with every track.  The original files are stored as flac's and I used DBpoweramp to convert to vorbis at q7 and mp3 at V0. So the files have been in the 200 - 240kbps range.  I guess I could experiment with an earlier version of lame and maybe using the command line instead of dbpoweramp.  At least it sounds like I should be able to get it working on my 5G based on your experience.

Thanks,
Perry

[lalittle]

"The Wall" is one of the albums I listenned to when checking for gapless playback (this seems to be the industry standard "gapless playback check" album) and I definitely don't have pops between songs.  I'm almost positive that this album was encoded with LAME version 3.97.b2 based on the date that I encoded it and the version of LAME that JR Media Center was using at that time (which was 3.97b2.)

My guess is that your issue has something to do with going to Flac first and then converting to mp3.  I encoded directly off the CD -- are you able to try this?  If encoding directly off the CD works for you, this would at least narrow down the issue.

Larry

[Llorean]

Yeah, I'm not 100% sure LAME will create the proper gapless information off of FLACs.

But one thing to try is as he suggested, creating the MP3s directly from the CD. The other is that you try the FLACs to see if they're properly gapless for you.

[70mustang]

I'll try a few things tonight and see what happens.  I'm not to sure about it being the flac files because I also used them to create the vorbis files which played fine.  I'm thinking it has something to do with dbpoweramp.  The first test I'm going to do is manually converting from flac->wav->mp3 from the command line.  If that doesn't work then I'll try ripping it again.  Thanks for the help.

Perry

[lowlight]

APEv2 tags on MP3's will break gapless in some cases.

[JimmyRock]

Has anyone acheived perfectly gapless mp3's?  Could this just be an issue with the ipod port?

I have the same problem with my iRiver iHP-140.  LAME v3.90 and v3.93 files created straight from the CDs (VBRs, using mostly the --r3mix settings).  All that I've tried still have a very slight gap.

-JimmyRock

[Llorean]

Have you recorded them and verified that there's an actual gap? Sometimes (because the songs are encoded seperately) while there's not a gap there can be a discrepancy in sound between the end of one song and the beginning of the next due to the nature of lossy compression. While there is no actual gap in the audio itself (no silence) it can sound like it simply because the tone jumps very slightly.

Of course, there could also be a bug in playback, but at least in my experiences my MP3s playback perfectly gapless.

[lalittle]

I have the same problem with my iRiver iHP-140.  LAME v3.90 and v3.93 files created straight from the CDs (VBRs, using mostly the --r3mix settings).  All that I've tried still have a very slight gap.

Try the "preset standard" setting when encoding with LAME.  This is what I use, and my mp3's are completely gapless with no pops.

Larry

[70mustang]

It looks like it was the id3 tags.  I had dbpoweramp setup to write APEv2 tags.  I changed it to write id3v2.3 & id3v1.1 tags and I still had slight gaps so I though maybe dbpoweramp was just overwriting the gap info that lame adds to the file header.  

I reconfigured dppoweramp to use the .exe version lame instead of the dll and it worked fine.  I'm guessing that it passes tags via command line with the .exe so lame creates the tag with gap info and dbpoweramp doesn't have to touch it.  There's no more gaps.  

Thanks to all that helped.

Perry

[saratoga]

LAME dlls in general seem to be buggy.  I recommend always using the exe, since it generally works better.

[Deano]

I can confirm saratoga's message, I use only the commandline version of LAME  3.97b2 and have no issues with gapless playback. These are converted from FLAC and I have no problem with Rockbox playing them gaplessly (along with Id3v2.4 tags written by Foobar2000).

[michael.conner]

(message had a bunch of embarassingly-outdated info which has been removed, although some can be seen in others' replies.  my bad.)

[lalittle]

The best way to get gapless playback w/Lame-encoded MP3's is to use the "--nogaptags --nogap" command-line switches using the .EXE file.

Why do you say this is the "best" way?   I've always just used the "preset standard" switch with the LAME encoder and gapless works fine.  Given this, what is the point of using the complicated command line switches shown above?

Thanks,

Larry