iPod Still not really gapless?

[OrganMusic]

I've read in at least one place that iTunes >7 and newer iPods are supposed to support fairly good gapless playback, including this guy who clearly isn't even much of an ipod fan.

Well I do get pretty decent gapless playback in iTunes on the Mac, neither my iPod-with-video 5th gen or iPod Touch 2nd gen running iOS4 get it quite right. I've heard worse, but there's still a definite pop. It is of course especially noticeable when there's loud music over the break.

I've been thinking about re-ripping some of my CDs into AAC 256k instead of MP3 192k VBR, but with the few I've done so far there's no improvement.

Any insight on settings that will help?

 

[Matthew Yohe]

Import with iTunes and you'll be fine.

Just rip one CD and test it.

 

[OrganMusic]

well did a bit more experimenting.

I tried Apple lossless works perfectly; I then tried re-ripping something again, still using AAC on "iTunes Plus" (256k) setting and this time it played perfectly.

Much of my library was ripped on other computers and transferred -- is that 'exact track length' tag that makes gapless possible in compressed formats somehow only in the library files and not in the audio files themselves?

 

[OrganMusic]

Import with iTunes and you'll be fine.

Just rip one CD and test it.

The bulk of my library was done with Exact Audio Copy (which turned out to be hardly any better than iTunes for error rates) and LAME 3.96 on my PC before I switched to mac, so I can see where there would be trouble with those files. But I was also having trouble with newer files imported with at least iTunes 8.x on the mac.

On that note, anything you can do improve CD read errors? I've got some CDs that play perfectly in any normal audio CD player but come up with all kinds of blips and garbled sections when ripped on computers. Several different computers even.

 

[blackburn]

My iPhone 2G and my ipod classic play gapless just fine.

ripped with max (has some issues with non standart toc's)
and encoded with XLD aac true vbr @ max vbr

Something that my ex-sony didn't have.

 

[Brucewl]

Nop, I play the gapless well in my iPod nano 4G, maybe you require too high