I'm sorry to report that wave files still have a small gap between them when played on the iPod. If anyone can confirm any format that gives truly gapless playback on the iPod, please let me know.
I find this curious. Can you verify that using MC with those same WAV files also produces a perceptible gap. Try with winamp too (if possible). Wav files are usually gapless if ripped correctly as that is the format they are present on a CD and the gap isn't perceptible.
I too hope that JRiver adds support for single track albums and cue sheets. APL works only for APE. I made a proposition for a possible solution here:
Ripping to APE is not an option as i have ripped to cue with VBR sometime back now and mp3 offers the most flexibility (no conversion hassles) with portable media players, is a third to a quarter the size of APE and sounds good enough to my ears at 192+kbs.
I noted the mcl idea. It will work for formats that are seek-friendly. The problem with mp3 is that it does not allow seeks to be made given a seek position. And a cue file is just that, a list of tracks with seek positions.
Now other players (winamp+mp3 cue) and
FB2K get around this by actually parsing the file from the beginning as its not possible with mp3 to directly jump to the point stated in the cue. FB2K is sample accurate, wimamp cheats/guesses so it appears faster at seeking but in reality it does not get it exactly right.
I would prefer that MC (if they decide to implement CUE) be sample exact. This brings a slight hit in seek performance (can be a fraction of a second to a whole second) but it would allow accurate Audio analysis and can take advantage of the ever powerful library.
I use FB2K for albums with cues currently, it works pretty well and has a light Album list function and makes direct edits the cue files. But i would prefer to do this in MC as FB2K is not as easy to mass tag (especially tracks in a cue)
Another idea i have heard to get around the mp3 seek problem is to wrap an mp3 in a mp4. mp4 supposedly has seek tables that will allow sample exact seeking. I tried this out in FB2k but found the performance only slightly better to the actual mp3 itself. So am not sure whether its worth doing.