Gapless Playback - the Funnest [sic] Thing Ever?

Ok, so, kudos to Apple for stepping up and “solving’ the problem of gapless playback in iTunes, which has been a *problem* of sorts from the beginning of its existence. For those of you who have monkeyed around with sound formats, you know that mp3 compression often results in the addition of some silent samples at the beginning and end of song files, an artifact that means that ripped mix CD’s skip in between every track, rendering the diligence of the DJ null.

I’m guessing the solution created is to process every song file in your library and stick info about your silent bits either in every file or in the library information (haven’t looked at it yet). Unfortunately, the problem with this is that if you are like me, you’ve lovingly set aside your old G4 machine and given it the new job of file serving, media serving, and also jukebox. Every time Apple introduces such a fix, my G4 has to struggle through our entire Mp3 library, rebuilding the iTunes library file. The result — it’s crashed twice so far while “Determining Gapless Playback Information”. I’m glad there is a solution for gapless playback, but it seems like there would be a better way for updating the library than choking your computer for 30 minutes the first time you run iTunes after an update…

(Btw, what’s with the missing alternating horizontal lines in the music list view - are my eyes supposed to be spreadsheet enabled now?)

5 comments Wed, 2006 Sep 13, 6:46am