Gapless Playback on Touch 2G 32GB?

[marilbil]

I just purchased an iPod Touch 2g 32GB. I already have an iPod Classic. I am going to use the Touch mostly for videos and apps, but a I had a number of favorite albums I wanted to put on it as well. I copied the albums from my iMac iTunes library to my Macbook Pro and added them to iTunes on the laptop. Plugged in the new Touch, and synced it to iTunes.

Some of the albums I copied are of the gapless variety. I was listening to one of them (a live album) on the Touch and realized that I now have gaps between the tracks. The albums play gaplessly in iTunes, but not on the Touch. The tracks in question show the "part of a gapless album" checked when the Touch is plugged in.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Does the Touch not support gapless? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.

Bill

[gerwen]

In my limited experience, it seems to depend on how they're encoded. When i used Nero AAC, gapless worked fine in iTunes, but not on my iPod. I switched to the latest version of Lame MP3, and it worked fine.

I'm not sure how well MP3 or AAC encoded in iTunes works, since i encode from Flac, and can't use iTunes for that.

Link in my sig has details on how i encode if you're interested.

[rockmyplimsoul]

The Touch definitely supports gapless playback, but for some reason the information is not transferring over. Note that "part of a gapless album" doesn't do what you think it does -- that setting only tells iTunes to not use crossfade (if enabled) while playing such songs on iTunes. By default, all songs are gapless, but some don't play that way because of the way they were encoded (usually outside of iTunes).

To fix your problem you might try tweaking the Get Info data for the affected songs. Maybe disable that "part of a gapless album" setting (since it doesn't really do what you think it does) and then re-sync.

[marilbil]

I really appreciate the help. Unfortunately that did not help. Can't figure out why this works fine on the Classic, but not the Touch. The files are the exact same files that on the Classic. They were just copied from my iMac (Classic) to my Macbook (Touch) and synced. There was no re-coding involved. The existing files were simply copied. The Touch must handle this differently.

[rockmyplimsoul]

Hmm, if you moved files from one computer to the other, perhaps that has more to do with the problem than the particular iPod you're using. When you add new songs to iTunes it is supposed to analyze the gapless information, so maybe something got hosed up when you copied the files over. A harmless thing you can try is to select all songs in your Macbook library, select Get Info, then select the "Part of a gapless album" option. That may force iTunes to re-analyze your library for gapless playback. Then re-sync the Touch (or if you manually manage it, delete all contents and re-load it).

You can always undo this gapless option, or leave it selected. Like I said above, it really has limited use and has nothing to do with how music plays on an iPod.

[kornchild2002]

What encoder and setting did you use for your songs? In other words, did you just pop in a CD and rip it with iTunes or did you use something else?

[marilbil]

Encoded with Nero and now everything works great! Many thanks for all the help!

[rockmyplimsoul]

Just so we (and others who stumble upon this) understand, did you re-rip the songs or do anything? Or did it just fix itself?

[marilbil]

Re-ripped the few CD's in question using Nero instead of iTunes.