gapless playback

[Machiventa]

I have a few gapless mp3 albums (not purchased at ZMP) and one has a definite nanosecond gap and another works flawlessly, no audible gap whatsoever.

[CrowdAds]

[grommet]

Yep, that's the norm... gapless MP3 content mostly works. The annoying part of the device is that it seems to "guess" on how to play gaplessly, even if the file may have the info to do it without guessing. (The LAME MP3 encoder stores padding and delay info in the header to allow perfect gapless playback without guessing, but Zune doesn't seem to use it... even though LAME is likely the most popular encoder at this point. Amazon, eMusic, etc. all use LAME.)

[lip]

Dave,
Any update on gapless with drm content?
LIP

[Ayepecks]

Cough... bump...

It'd be nice to have better gapless playback, as some of the CDs I ripped really don't sound like they have it.

[lip]

Yeah, I would love to get this fixed...really really disappointing that MS do not seem interested or able to fix this...this kind of thing worries me about MS as it leads me to believe that perhaps they are not that interested in providing a truly good music experience...I can understand not having every codec under the sun but these sorts of things are pretty important in my eyes...

Dave/MS, you need to improve in this area...

[monkeyninja]

Gapless playback has been my biggest gripe with my beloved zune HD since I bought it.

I mainly use ripped or downloaded content as opposed to marketplace content. It's a problem for all the different formats or ripping methods I use. I usually rip in Variable Bit Rate. There is almost always a jump between tracks which should blend seamlessly into one another.

If there was a message from the Zune team that stated: Do this or that to your music to achieve gapless, then that would be fine, but there has been no official advice on how to achieve gapless.