Gaps Between Connected Songs

[Pepe Lamboda]

Hey everyone, I'm a bit new to MP3 players, so a general question - many of my CDs have tracks that are connected, but my Sansa Fuze (and my other old SanDisk MP3 player) always has a gap between tracks that it plays. Any way around that, or are all MP3 players like that?

[CrowdAds]

[Cruleworld]

unless the player supports "gappless playback" then no there is no way around it.

[TheBar1]

Pepe - The feature you are describing is referred to as gapless playback, and the Fuze, along with may other MP3 players does not offer it. It's possible that future firmware might include this feature, though, as it is often one of the things that MP3 Player owners complain about.

[HipHopScribe]

Microsoft Zunes, the Rio Karma (old player, no longer made), the Trekstor Vibez and iPods (starting with 5th gen) have gapless playback. Using Rockbox (an alternative firmware) gives gapless support to these devices:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox#Supported_devices

[musichound]

I just want to point out that the Zunes and iPods use a software hack to achieve this. A very good hack, but it's all in the software.

[Cruleworld]

Originally Posted by HipHopScribe

Microsoft Zunes, the Rio Karma (old player, no longer made), the Trekstor Vibez and iPods (starting with 5th gen) have gapless playback. Using Rockbox (an alternative firmware) gives gapless support to these devices:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox#Supported_devices

They way you said that makes it sound like all of those use Rockbox to allow for this feature, when the Zune never had rockbox made for it and uses the OF for gappless playback.

[Skinjob]

Originally Posted by Cruleworld

They way you said that makes it sound like all of those use Rockbox to allow for this feature, when the Zune never had rockbox made for it and uses the OF for gappless playback.

What musichound meant was that neither the Zune or iPod actually support gapless in the players themselves. With the iPod, it's actually iTunes that does all the work to prepare the files to play back with no gap. Without running the files through iTunes first the iPod would not be gappless. Same with Zune and it's associated software. Probably not an important distinction to most users, but it does underline how difficult it is to get gapless right in a firmware-only solution.

Players that support gapless without preprocessing the files on a computer first are few and far between. The afformentioned Karma and Vibez can do it. Also, as mentioned, Rockbox firmware can do it.

The difficulty also depends on the file format. Gapless is realively easy with Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. It's much more difficult with MP3.

[Cruleworld]

The zune requires no processing on the software's side, The Zune as a device does it all.

[HipHopScribe]

Originally Posted by Cruleworld

They way you said that makes it sound like all of those use Rockbox to allow for this feature, when the Zune never had rockbox made for it and uses the OF for gappless playback.

I thought my post was clear, but anyway, I didn't mean to suggest that.

[Pepe Lamboda]

Thanks for the info everyone, I hope someday a firmware update might help.

[diik0nn]

This is a firmware update I'm also really hoping for...