I happened across this video today on Youtube. The chap is saying that a lot of CD players don’t play gapless CDs ..er…gaplessly (he demonstrates a Cambridge model in the video) and they insert a gap between tracks – so, for instance, DSOTM or Abbey Road simply don’t play properly. Really?? Has anyone come across this? I am amazed if this is true, but he seems convinced.
CD players that won’t play gapless..?!
by 43 Comments
Never an issue for me. Only if ripped or burnt to another CD.
It’s not something I’ve ever encountered. I must have owned over half a dozen different CD players since the 80s from a variety of different manufacturers and every single one has played gaplessly.
Ditto.
That is probably when playing MP3s on it.
I noticed similar when ripping to ipod (or similar) – a momentary pause (major clunkiness of tracks if random play). But a cd player- wouldn’t expect it to unless it’s reading ahead and converting/re-processing the sound output, and so operating in the boundaries of the track markers
I know some cheaper CD players don’t do gapless.
Basically, in this modern day and age, most CD players are built around PC DVD drives and do everything in software, which is supplied in the form of a SDK (Software Development Kit). Most software does not support gapless playback ‘out of the box’ and running on a MicroProcessor.
It takes Software Engineering effort to take the SDK and edit it for gapless playback. Many companies don’t bother (or don’t even have an Engineering team). I know Cambridge Audio do, as I know some of their London-based team.
I did the hardware design for the first portable MP3 player to support gapless playback, and it took two SW engineers about a month to get it working. Their first effort resulted in a gap of about two minutes, and we had a kind of Blue Peter-style Gapless-o-Meter in the corner of the office.
This is the kind of answer we love and expect from you!
Our very own “Cambridge model”….
I *think* I had a Cambridge CD player that inserted gaps between track. It didn’t last long.
Just to be clear, he reckons this affects shop bought CDs. He seems convinced, but I’m sure someone here will have come across this if true.
Red Book CDs actually have a 2-second gap between tracks, but canny Mastering Engineers came up with a way to put the track start ID two seconds before the track end ID of the previous track. As a fudge to get gapless playback if the playback hardware supports it.
Nope. I think the guy is insane.
Anyway, speaking of Red Book CDs and all that, I remember older CDs in their technical notes talking of ‘chapter’ or ‘section’ divisions (can’t remember the exact term) within individual tracks, but I have NEVER know a CD or a cd player to make use of this function. A shame really, because it would be ideal for movement divisions in a classical symphony, especially if there is more than one symphony on the cd. Or even to divide up the different parts of, ooh, say Atom Heart Mother or Supper’s Ready, if you are that way inclined. Anyone ever seen this being used?
“Cue up Funky Dung!”
Dung is inherently funky.
In the original sense of the word Funky.
Hmmm, not entirely sure Pink Floyd weren’t aware of that.
«36 – 24, hips about 30
I see a fine lady
And I start talkin’ dirty.
She looked at me
And she raised her thumb.
She said “Jam down the road,
You funky-assed bum.”»
These index points were certainly used on some early classical CDs to divide up the different portions of a single movement, particularly if that movement consisted of a set of variations. I know of examples on the defunct Denon and Koch International labels, but presumably others did it too.
Interesting. I’ve honestly never seen them, and I think it’s a missed opportunity. A lot of stuff about CDs sounds like it was kind of cobbled together, with clumsy loose ends like this – but I suppose that’s the same with all technology!
I’ve got a Musical Fidelity X-Ray CD player that’s 20 years or so old. Its remote has index back/forward buttons as well as the usual track back/forward ones. I’d be surprised if I’ve used them more than half a dozen times in its long life.
My first thought when I read the title of this thread was that he had been off to an eel-market in downtown Bangkok and had bought dodgy CDs that hadn’t been ripped properly.
I know, for example, that Nero will by default put a 2 second gap between tracks if you use the built-in audio CD settings; so if I’m assembling a cunning gapless intro to an Afterword ‘swap’ CD, I’ll manually change the start gap for all but the first track to 0 (zero) seconds, in order to ensure continuous play. But if I use the built-in ‘Copy-CD’ settings, I’ll get a bit for bit copy, and any zero second gaps will just carry over automatically to the copy. It would therefore be easy to use the wrong settings and introduce a default 2 second pause inadvertently. Every summer, my bird-scarers strung over the fruit cage are testament to this easily made piratical faux-pas.
Here’s a dull game to play, especially anyone who has a 1980s or early 90s CD player.
Feed in a shop-bought gapless CD and skip a track.
Do you hear two seconds of the end of the previous song?
Experiment attempted 12:45pm 21st December 2023 – Negative result. (High Llamas gapless CD from 1996 – “Hawaii”, Numark NDX200 CD player from indeterminate year this century!)
I’ll look forward to the big spreadsheet of results when everyone else tries this experiment. 🙂
That’s so 2010…
Had a few 80s/90s CD players in my time. Don’t recall this ever happening
My ripped version of Happy Trails was ruined by this arbitrary gap making, courtesy the then computer I had, name unremembered.
Re.»Do you hear two seconds of the end of the previous song?«
That famously happened with the first batch of Queen CDs from the early 90s. CD Watch magazine (precursor of the Hoffman site) was furious – it turned out those clever techs at EMI hadn’t read the mastering manual properly and had used the by-way described by Fentonsteve above.
The firmware of early/mid-90s CD players (was) adapted (by a human) to cope with this kind of human-thinking-it-knows-best malarky.
So any CD player post-1990-something is clever enough to mute.
My early CD players were Philips ones (I worked for them) who co-invented the format (with Sony), so presumably they knew what they were doing.
I was at Arcam during my A-level & university years ( 1986-1991), and remember it being a thing when when the first UK CDs of Abbey Road came out in 1987.
Arcam CD players of the time used Philips mechanisms with custom electronics. I think the current ones use Sony mechanisms (as they also play SACDs).
Total diversion here, but I’m just reminded that it always bugged me that since Abbey Road came out on CD they’ve always listed Her Majesty as a separate track. It’s not! It was never that way on the old LP, it was a little unexpected nugget at the end.
I think it was eventually listed on some early vinyl pressings
Not on my watch. 🙂
You had Abbey Road on your watch?
Amaaaaaaaaaaaaazing!
When they were cutting the edge, they must have had to go around you.
U OK, hun???
Never had an issue with legit CDs but had an absolute nightmare trying to get an MP3 based tracklist of Smile burnt onto a CD-R with no gaps between the tracks.
Was back in the early 2000s before any full album was officially released, but a site had a full selection of tracks and playlists so you could make your own version.
I’ve been getting into Smile recently. It’s fascinating how many fan versions are out there, it seems to be the kind of album that invites that kind of collaboration and interaction. I’m starting to think about putting together my own one (I’m probably going for a kind of proggy (!) one: three long suites based around Heroes and Villains, Surfs Up and Good Vibrations, then Cabin Essence as a little standalone track: a four track, 30-35 minute album!)
I actually don’t really like the official Smile that much. Too meandering, long and stop-start. My favourite fan mix so far is called Dumb Angel I think, although when I downloaded it the tracks say Smile Pocket Symphony or something like that.
@arthur cowslip
I think the one thing all the released versions miss is it would have needed to be around 45 mins long to fit on 2 sides of vinyl.
Surely ‘gaps between tracks’ is specifically a feature of the audio CD standard, whereas a disc full of MP3s is just another collection of data files – they might as well be jpg files for all the difference it would make.
That’s why CD replication software distinguishes between duplication of an ‘Audio CD’ or simple duplication of a data CD via the ‘CD copy’ option (amongst other posibilities) – the two distinctly different processes read the source disc and format the target CD-R differently in each case.
My car audio can play MP3s, but it just reads the disc looking for files with the relevant file extension and plays them one after the other – any ‘pause’ between them is just the brief delay it takes for the software to seek the next file, read it and stream it back for amplification.
The only way you could programme in a longer delay would be to add silence to either the beginning or end of each MP3, or for the playing software itself to introduce a delay that isn’t actually encoded within the data on the disc.
Some CD burner software misinterpreted the red book 2-second pre-track gap and instead added 2 seconds of silence. Rip the resulant CDR and every mp3 file has 2 seconds of silence at the start or end.
The only ways I know to get ris of this are either to rip with EAC with the ‘remove silence’ option enabled, or to rip to WAV files and chop it out with Audacity (or similar).
For quite a lot of mp3 players, the next track after the one that’s playing is read ahead and buffered in memory, or at least part of it, so it can start playing immediately without any loading/reading delay.
From about 2005, yes, before that there was a brief pause (and no/little RAM memory for buffering).
Those first mp3 players were really very sketchy, although later ones were much more slick. I’d love to say it was down to my arrival on the scene, but the dozen or so Software Engineers had much more to do with it.
It’s Christmas guys and my head hurts!
That’s not supposed to happen until Boxing Day.