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How to play iTunes 7 tracks gaplessly in Rockbox?

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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:

--- Quote from: PaulJam on January 11, 2007, 01:16:00 PM ---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.


--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote ---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.

--- End quote ---

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!

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