How to play iTunes 7 tracks gaplessly in Rockbox?

[zlp]

Does anybody really know how iTunes 7 gapless data is stored? I wonder if Rockbox could someday honor both LAME and iTunes gapless info (just like the Rockbox Database scans both folders/files or iTunes DB, which I must say is quite fantastic!). I guess it's a feature request (and therefore in the wrong place) but I wanted to get my facts straight before requesting anything. Anybody have any observations that differ from these? :

ENCODE WITH LAME
-------------------------
If you encode with (recent) LAME, you get gapless in Rockbox (as you always have) and also in iTunes 7 because it translates the LAME headers into the (tag-based?) iTunes 7 gapless format.

ENCODE WITH iTUNES 7
------------------------------
If you encode with iTunes 7 you get iTunes 7 gapless format but no LAME headers, so Rockbox will not play the tracks gaplessly.

ENCODE WITH GAPS
-------------------------
If you encode with any non-gapless encoder (old LAME, all previous iTunes) and import your tracks into iTunes 7, it will approximate the gapless info (which it seems to do exceedingly well for my tracks!) and store the results in iTunes 7 gapless format. That means no LAME headers and therefore no gapless in Rockbox.

[Deano]

iTunes stores gapless information in its own database (and perhaps tags, I'm not 100% certain on this point though).

[PaulJam]

Hi,

according to this post #137 in this tread the gapless information is stored in a tag (iTunSMPB) in the file. So i think it would be possible to implement gapless playback for files encoded by itunes.

[soap]

Hi,

according to this post #137 in this tread the gapless information is stored in a tag (iTunSMPB) in the file. So i think it would be possible to implement gapless playback for files encoded by itunes.

I think you might find the problem with that is very similar to the "problem" with Rockbox and WMA.
If A is the set of all people who encode with iTunes...and B is the set of all Rockbox coders/developers...and C is the set of all WMA users...I'd wager a fair sum of money that the intersection of A and B is even smaller than the intersection of B and C.

[zlp]

I think you might find the problem with that is very similar to the "problem" with Rockbox and WMA.
If A is the set of all people who encode with iTunes...and B is the set of all Rockbox coders/developers...and C is the set of all WMA users...I'd wager a fair sum of money that the intersection of A and B is even smaller than the intersection of B and C.

Agreed, but somebody in category B invested a lot of time into the iTunes DB parsing code, which is only useful to category A. I'm a Mac and Linux user who has tried Amarok and a few other player/database alternatives, but when iTunes 7 arrived with gapless, I called off my search for another app because I find iTunes to be a well-rounded (if inflexible) player/database app. I'll never pay money for DRM'd music and I certainly don't appreciate the obfuscation of the iPod database, but a "Rockboxed" iPod Nano comes pretty close to my ideal little DAP. Maybe there are developers out there who wish for an elegant universe where gapless MP3s of both flavors play equally well on Rockbox. I certainly can't look a gift horse in the mouth, though!

[soap]

I think you might find the problem with that is very similar to the "problem" with Rockbox and WMA.
If A is the set of all people who encode with iTunes...and B is the set of all Rockbox coders/developers...and C is the set of all WMA users...I'd wager a fair sum of money that the intersection of A and B is even smaller than the intersection of B and C.

Agreed, but somebody in category B invested a lot of time into the iTunes DB parsing code, which is only useful to category A.

If D is the set of people who use iTunes to manage their database, I suspect set A is a very very small subset of D.
The iTunes DB parsing code is useful to the entire set D, not just A.
LAME is, bar none, the best MP3 encoder.  I find it hard to believe many people who value Rockbox would also fail to use the most mature, most tested, highest quality MP3 encoder - be it the one which comes with their choice of music database or not.

[GodEater]

*Flameproof suit on*

I use iTunes to look after my music, and always have done - even before I actually owned an iPod.

By "look after" I mean :

I, put my shiny new CD into my PC. I push the "rip" button in iTunes.
iTunes does the following : Goes off to cddb and grabs all the info about the CD. Extracts the audio from the CD. Encodes it to mp3 at the encoding level I've chosen, and writes all the id3 tags for me. It then writes all those files into a nicely organised folder on my PC.

I've still yet to find another application that does the same with the minimum of fiddling.

[xlarge]

Since you are writing "PC" i assume you are not a mac fanboy - and your explanation of what iTunes does for you is exactly what MediaMonkey does for me.
(The only issue i've got with MediaMoneky is that it doesn't write ReplayGain tags that Rockbox understands - but iTunes doesn't either from what i've heard...)

[GodEater]

Cool - I'll have a look at that as well then - thanks for the tip

[Edit]
Ah shame - I knew it was too good to be true. It requires fiddling with to get it to do unlimited mp3 encodes.

[AlexP]

EAC and CDex will do all this for you after the inital set up.

[GodEater]

Again, it's the "initial setup" thing I'm not interested in. There's nothing to be configured in iTunes, it just does it.

[AlexP]

That is fair enough, but the inital set up is maybe 5 mins max, and you end up with lame gapless (or whatever other codec you want) and a completely flexible system.  Personally I'd rather spend 5 minutes than use iTunes (actually there are quite a lot of things I'd rather do other than use iTunes!), but each to their own.

[GodEater]

I suspect the setup is maybe five minutes if you're familiar with it.

I'm not.

I'd have to read up on CD-Ex, dig through all the command line options for LAME etc. etc.

It's not that I couldn't - it's just I fail to see the point when iTunes already does what I want.

[AlexP]

Command line options are all built in - you point it to the lame directory location, and select what vbr etc from lists.  Anyway, I'm not trying to convert you!

[linuxstb]

Does anybody really know how iTunes 7 gapless data is stored? I wonder if Rockbox could someday honor both LAME and iTunes gapless info (just like the Rockbox Database scans both folders/files or iTunes DB, which I must say is quite fantastic!).

Just to clarify, Rockbox DOES NOT parse the itunes db.  The database generation process simply scans all the files on the disk.  

When itunes copies your files to your ipod, it renames them, but the tags are intact.  This allows the Rockbox database to index them.