Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[stuart_tetley]

Hi,

Can anyone confirm whether the new iPods' gapless playback capabilities will work easily with MC?  As I understand it, iTunes 7 does a 'determining gapless playback' information process, during which it (presumably) is inserting some kind of tag to tell the iPod the exact in/out points needed to achieve true gapless playback.  I'm guessing this is probably similar to what the LAME encoder has been doing for quite some time now. 

I have most of my music encoded in APE format (with a few remaining MPC files I haven't got around to re-ripping yet.)  MC will automatically convert these to MP3 when loading them onto an iPod.  My question is, will these mp3's play gaplessly on the iPod.  I don't want to have iTunes installed at all if possible.

Thanks


Stuart

[lalittle]

I haven't heard of the new capability of iTunes, but it would have to use the EXACT same metadata that the LAME encoder uses for everything to work properly.  If iTunes used a "similar" method that was slightly different, I don't think it could work.

On top of this, there "could" be issues with converting APE to mp3.  I read about an issue similar to this on the Rockbox forums where the converstion process between certain file types and mp3 would result in the gapless metadata being lost.  I can't remember if the "other" file type was APE or not, however.

All that aside, you can use Rockbox for gapless playback with iPods (www.rockbox.org.)

On a side note, which iPods are supposedly able to do gapless playback natively?  I have a fairly new iPod 60Gig (Video iPod) which does NOT do gapless playback with the native apple firmware when synching with MC.  It does, however, do gapless playback when using the Rockbox firmware.

Larry

[udeups]

To get gapless support for your video iPod, you'll have to install iTunes 7 and use its update firmware functionality. It will then get the latest firmware for your particular unit. That was literally the first time I've installed iTunes, and after updating firmware, I immediately uninstalled it. Hopefully MC will do whatever needs to be done to support the new firmware's gapless support.

[lalittle]

The Rockbox firmware for iPods can actually be found at http://www.rockbox.org/

Oops -- thanks for catching that.  I changed it.

I did some reading and I see what people are talking about now.  As mentioned in other threads, it does appear that iTunes is doing something "new" that MC does not yet emulate.  It seems likely that this "new" process is related to the "indexing" iTunes does to achieve gapless playback.

Does anybody at JR know if this is something that MC will be supporting?  Nothing against Rockbox, but I have to say that it would be VERY nice if MC + iPod did gapless playback natively.  Is this being looked into?

Thanks,

Larry

[slipknot]

To get gapless support for your video iPod, you'll have to install iTunes 7 and use its update firmware functionality. It will then get the latest firmware for your particular unit. That was literally the first time I've installed iTunes, and after updating firmware, I immediately uninstalled it. Hopefully MC will do whatever needs to be done to support the new firmware's gapless support.

So are you saying that as of now, loading the new Ipod from MC does not result in gapless playback?

[slipknot]

I stopped in at an Apple store today to buy a new ipod 80 gig, specifically to get gapless playback.  After talking to the salesman, and how itunes does "things".  I left the store without buying one.

[udeups]

So are you saying that as of now, loading the new Ipod from MC does not result in gapless playback?

Well, actually, I haven't done enough investigation on the issue to confirm or deny. I haven't had time to really listen to my iPod since updating it. As mentioned in other threads, when I updated the firmware on my 5G iPod, iTunes started a laboriously long "determining gapless support on iPod library" (or something to that effect). I cancelled this process, and just had iTunes initialize my iPod and start from scratch.

I (maybe naively) assumed that Media Center didn't inherently do whatever process that iTunes does to enable gapless support on the iPod library.

[TimB]

I'm in another country travelling but my 80gig iPod arrived yesterday and I can't wait to get back.

I'm upgrading (from 60gig) so I can have the increased storage, nothing more, nothing less.

I've even used gotomypc.com to upgrade my PC to the latest MC in anticipation!

-=Tim=-

[SwellGuy]

Media Center 12 will support gapless playback on iPods.

[udeups]

Great to hear!

[stuart_tetley]

Excellent news!!

But when? 


I rolled over and bought one finally.

[lalittle]

Excellent news!!

But when? 

It was introduced with version 12.0.76 on 9/22/06.

Larry

[stuart_tetley]

It was introduced with version 12.0.76 on 9/22/06.

Larry

Sweet.  I now have access to the MC12 beta, so it's time to play!