The playback gap that is driving me out of my mind.
Linc
OwnerDetroit Icrontian
Listen, Pretty. Odd. by Panic! At the Disco is one of the best albums ever. But let's move past that.
The first 2 tracks of the album are meant to be gapless playback. When I listed to it the first hundred times, they were a seamless flow of sound and it was glorious.
Sometime about a year ago, a 1-second gap appeared between them. Was it that I deleted the album and re-downloaded from iCloud to fix a sync problem? Was it upgrading to iTunes 11? I don't know. What I do know is that I have spent hours of my life trying to make the insanity stop.
First, there is no gap in the tracks themselves. Adjusting the start or stop time on the tracks does nothing but chop off song.
Second, I have researched the hell out of iTunes now-gone "gapless playback" feature. They say it's supposed to "just know", but I suspect that the Panic! folks didn't properly mark it as gapless. I've tried manually hacking the XML file for my iTunes library to add the gapless tag and recompile from that, to no avail.
Third, I've tried other software, and I've tried software to stitch the tracks together. Both have kept the gap.
I swear to the gods I'm going to buy a waveform editor and manually edit the tracks millisecond by millisecond and stitch them together if I can't find a solution. I truly cannot listen to the album in its current state. Any ideas?
Comments
Can you upload the two files or share them? I could probably fix it with sox.
I'll PM you a link. Not gonna redistribute for the world wide wibbles.
PirateNinja graciously edited them together - which made me realize the tracks were truly fucked in the iTunes version. You can't tell until you run them together, but they're missing data.
Knowing that, I went dumpster diving in my Time Machine backups. A year ago... they were MP3s, which means I probably ripped it originally and the fuckups started when I synced it to the iCloud version.
I restored the files... and oh my god, audio bliss. It gave me chills to have it finally working again.
Thanks Dan!
My rip:
iCloud:
PEDDLERS OF LIES, DAMNABLE LIES.
They took the album version of Nine In The Afternoon, labelled it "Radio Edit" (by accident, I presume) and made it track 16 (a bonus track) and took the actual radio edit and made it track 2. That swap accounts for the extra issues beyond the gap (the time difference on track 1 is less than a tenth of a second - it's rounding that makes it look like a full second).
Jiminey, what a mess. But I have my album back now.
VICTORY.
iTunes fucking music up since 2001.
To be fair, my suspected culprit is whoever at the label added their album. iTunes didn't decide to name the wrong one Radio Edit and not mark it as gapless.
THEY HAD ONE JOB.
you inspired me to find my panic! cds. havent listened to them in a while
PS: you ruined it for me now. i never payed attention to the gap before, but it seems i have the same issue you had...and now it drives me crazy!
It's the first thing I put on again today. It's like an old friend came home. And I'm kinda horrified that people think the iTunes version is normal.
Just remember they only had 2 albums.
They kept using the name but it's like Pink Floyd post-Waters. Blarg.
oh, that explains why i didnt like vices and virtues
And here's the proof.
I probably have a more negative view of iTunes than most. When I was in HS I spent a good week ripping all my 120 or so of my cds onto my computer using iTunes. When I was done I went to go play them and iTunes returns the goddamn error message, "iTunes cannot play this file type" HOW THE FUCK CAN A PROGRAM RIP CDS INTO A FORMAT IT CAN'T PLAY.
Fuck iTunes ever since then.
dat gap tho
I switched phones yesterday and I guess iTunes Match, when enabled, takes over the world and it re-introduced this playback gap by assuming its iCloud copy was superior. I killed it with fire and vengeance.