I think what Pink Waters is saying that when Gapless play was enabled with earlier builds of MC there was no pop & click. It's not true gapless but there was no pop & click, so for all intents & purposes it sounded OK.
This is the quote from Pink Waters I was responding to in my last post:
I'm just tested again listening to old mp3 tracks I used to listen to since MC 9.1 with no noticable gaps
He didn't mention anything about "pops" in that post -- he simply mentioned "gaps." I took this to mean that he felt that MC used to play songs "gapless" but now it doesn't. I was merely trying to clarify the issue of "gaplessness" with mp3 files and MC.
Note also that I didn't bring up the gapless issue with mp3's until Pink Waters mentioned "broken" mp3 playback. It was at this point that I referenced the OTHER subject of the LAME encoder which seems interrelated with this issue.
I don't know if mp3s don't sound very gaplless with gapless playback on, but the old percentage gapless playback I've got with the older version decreased in a noticable way with pops and clicks in the latest new builds of MC... (hope you understand it this post)
It appears that we're talking about two different (albeit related) issues here -- the "gapless" issue and the more prominent appearence of "pops" in between tracks. I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your posts, but I believe that these issues may be related, and the solution to one issue may present the solution to the other.
As I mentioned above, I agree that this build causes more pops than previous versions of MC, particularly (in my case) between wav files, which as far as I know did not used to produce pops in between the tracks.
Larry