KVR Audio

booboo_US · Post by **booboo_US** » Tue Aug 21, 2012 1:54 am

Hi. I am very new to this. I have ripped a bunch of CD's onto my computer using MP3. Now, I want to use Nero 8 Express Essential to write the MP3 files onto a single CD so that I would carry a single CD with me in my car rather than a bunch (even though the sound quality is not as great as the original, but it is fine for the car). Now, the problem that I have is that the tracks do not seem to be continuous. In other words, on the original CD, for example (Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd), tracks 1 and 2 are continous and going from one track to the other is completely seamless. However, when I burn the MP3 files on the CD, as track 1 finishes, a cut is made and then track 2 starts and you do not get the nice flow that exist on the original CD. When I play the CD in my car or home stereo, the tracks are not seamless, but on my computer (Media Player) they are.

I had read in another post that this is the way MP3's work (Basically an MP3 file is composed on a series of frames - data chunks of fixed length - so unless the size of the file is a multiple of the frame size a small section of silence gets inserted to make up the length of the final frame) and some suggestion were given, however, I did not quite understand what to do. I would appreciate it if someone can give me detail instructions on how to do this so that I would not get the break in between my tracks. Thanks for all your help.

Jace-BeOS · Post by **Jace-BeOS** » Tue Aug 21, 2012 3:23 am

I'm afraid this is a feature (missing) of the playback device. Your car stereo cd player either supports gapless MP3 playback or doesn't. The MP3 files aren't the determiner of this.

cimoc · Post by **cimoc** » Tue Aug 21, 2012 5:34 am

Nero 6 which I used to use did have an option for allowing gaps between songs or not (and specifying the length of the gaps). It was somewhere in the "more option" dialog.
The freeware (and portable, as in no installation) CDBurnerXP which I use now definitely supports this feature, either for wav or mp3. The option to define the gap appears after you select and add your files and you press "burn"

ford442 · Post by **ford442** » Tue Aug 21, 2012 5:43 am

right - check your program for a default setting of 1 - 2 second pause - Nero 10 does this too and i always debate whether to turn it off..

BertKoor · Post by **BertKoor** » Tue Aug 21, 2012 3:46 pm

Gapless playback on MP3 players is a very rare feature. If you want gapless MP3 playback, then you should combine ripped WAVs into one wav and convert that 30-minutes or so long WAV to MP3.

booboo_US · Post by **booboo_US** » Tue Aug 21, 2012 11:32 pm

BertKoor wrote:Gapless playback on MP3 players is a very rare feature. If you want gapless MP3 playback, then you should combine ripped WAVs into one wav and convert that 30-minutes or so long WAV to MP3.

Thank you BertKoor and Jace-BeOS. I have been playing around with this issue, and I doubt that it may be the player. The reason I say this is that I use the Audacity software and at the end of the track there was about a 0.5 second of complete silence. I erased this 0.5 second, and recreated the MP3 file. then at the end of this newly created MP3 file, again there was a 0.5 seconds (or so) of silence. I believe it is this silence which creates the gap.

Now, I have been looking into creating one long WAV (continuous) file of all my tracks. However, after I do this, per your suggestion, is there anyway of telling the player which track is which so that I can skip tracks or move back, just like a regular CD? If this is possible, some help would be greatly appreciated as I have no idea how to do this.

Also, creating WAV files produce a rather large file (about 10 times larger than the MP3) file, which defeats my original purpose of putting several CD's into one so that I would only carry one CD rather than several of them. Thanks. Any other suggestions? Thanks.

RunBeerRun · Post by **RunBeerRun** » Wed Aug 22, 2012 1:12 am

Foobar has a box to check/uncheck during burning marked "burn gaplessly".

booboo_US · Post by **booboo_US** » Wed Aug 22, 2012 5:10 am

RunBeerRun wrote:Foobar has a box to check/uncheck during burning marked "burn gaplessly".

Thank you for your reply RunBeerRun. I used foobar 2000, and even though it worked, there are still two problems.

1- Even though all the MP3 files would fit on a single CD, now they no longer would, and I had to burn them on two cd's.

2- Even though the files play much more smoothly than before, but still as the music goes from one track to the next, it is not completely seamless. I hear a click. This in part maybe due to the fact as I had explained earlier the MP3 file leaves a bit of silence in each file, hence the clicking.

I guess, I can live with issue number 1 (increasing the number of discs from 1 disc to 2, no more than that). However, I would like to fix this clicking and get a true seamless music playing from track to track. Any other suggestions? Thanks for all your helps.

cimoc · Post by **cimoc** » Wed Aug 22, 2012 6:02 am

Weird, I just tried burning 4 mp3 tracks seamlessly with CDBurnerXP and it worked.
Anyway, if Foorbar does the trick, just stick with it.
Regarding the size of the resulting file, you might try lower mp3 settings? (I suppose you specify this somewhere along the burning process, maybe the default option is a setting higher than your original setting?).
Regarding the click, could it be a zero crossing problem/ songs cutting abruptly? Perhaps you could try importing them all in one track in Audacity and crossfading between songs.
Best of luck!

Hovmod · Post by **Hovmod** » Wed Aug 22, 2012 8:38 am

If you burn it as an audio CD; yes, but you have to tell Foobar or Nero to skip gaps.
If you simply copy mp3-files to a CD and depend on the player to playback the mp3 files then it depends on the player.

(the "yes" above also depends on how they were made in the first place. Most likely you'll get a click, at the very least.)

BertKoor · Post by **BertKoor** » Wed Aug 22, 2012 12:19 pm

Wait.. You had the original CD and ripped it to MP3, right? The MP3 files you put on a CD-ROM because it can hold 10x the capacity of an audio CD, right? And now you're burning the MP3's to an audio CD again??? That sounds plain silly, there's no bonus. You could as well take the original CD with you, or make a duplicate directly.

booboo_US · Post by **booboo_US** » Wed Aug 22, 2012 5:04 pm

BertKoor wrote:Wait.. You had the original CD and ripped it to MP3, right? The MP3 files you put on a CD-ROM because it can hold 10x the capacity of an audio CD, right? And now you're burning the MP3's to an audio CD again??? That sounds plain silly, there's no bonus. You could as well take the original CD with you, or make a duplicate directly.

No, in soome cases I bought the songs from online and they came in MP3 or similar format. On some other cases, I cataully ripped the CD as MP3. So, now, I have multiple songs from multiple albums that I am trying to put on a single CD, hence the conversion to MP3 so that they would fit on one Cd and my car stero would play.

Jace-BeOS · Post by **Jace-BeOS** » Wed Aug 22, 2012 9:42 pm

To clarify:

CD Audio discs CAN be written GAPLESS.

MP3 CD players in a car stereo either support gapless (rare, no examples to give) or they don't. You cannot change this no matter what you do with the MP3 files or the CDR writing. It's a data streaming issue in the MP3 decoder software of the playback device.

booboo_US · Post by **booboo_US** » Wed Aug 22, 2012 11:29 pm

Jace-BeOS wrote:To clarify:

CD Audio discs CAN be written GAPLESS.

MP3 CD players in a car stereo either support gapless (rare, no examples to give) or they don't. You cannot change this no matter what you do with the MP3 files or the CDR writing. It's a data streaming issue in the MP3 decoder software of the playback device.

Thank you Jace-BeOS. I was afraid of that and have sort of come to the same conclusion after playing around with this for the last two days. Any suggestions as to what is the best way to convert (condense) multiple music albums on a single or two CD's so that I can take one or two cd's with me to the car as oppose to 8 for example. I have found that if I convert the CD's into OGG format and then write an audio CD (CDA files), it will give me gapless audio and works in my car stero. However, since the tracks are not in folders (simulating albums) it is very difficult, if I want to listen to the last track of the last album for example. I have to skip so many tracks, and I cannot simply change folders (like you can with MP3) to the to the desired album. Any ideas or suggestions on this? Thanks for all your help.

Jace-BeOS · Post by **Jace-BeOS** » Thu Aug 23, 2012 1:19 am

I have no suggestions about condensing multiple audio CDs for travel. I once made a "best of" NIN The Fragile CD for car use but I miss the songs I couldn't fit on the disc, so it's not any solution to swapping CDs while driving. I used to use a Sony MiniDisc player for portable music but the capacity was the same as audio CD. And MiniDisc is dead. When I started carrying a PDA, I quickly switched to that, using MP3. Then I got an iPhone, and that was the final step. I rarely use discs now, though I still like them for fidelity and physical backup/liner notes, but that's at home. Rarely do I use CDs in the car unless a passenger takes charge of discs on a long drive.

While I do have a car stereo with cd player (& MP3 support, which doesn't do gapless playback), I most often plug my iPhone into an auxiliary-in cable that the installers left me access to through the center console. While I sometimes play CDs or MP3 discs, I have a happier time with my iPhone providing iPod functionality (& it's of course gapless that way), through the car stereo. It's small, fits in my lap, etc. sadly, there's the need to look away from driving to see the screen in order to change music. Passenger is useful there again.

Is there a way to burn a tracked MP3 CD without pauses between the tracks