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Watch for a filename length issue in iTunes
Authored by: shavenyak on Feb 10, '05 10:51:16AM

Better yet, if Apple would just FIX ITUNES so it plays consecutive tracks without a gap, we wouldn't need that ridiculous Join Tracks feature.

Before anyone responds... no, setting Crossfade to zero doesn't work. At least, not well enough for listening to Pink Floyd. There's still a very noticeable hiccup at the transitions. There are some music programs that play them seamlessly, as God intended. Too bad they all either suck, or run on Windows (but I repeat myself... :) ).



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Watch for a filename length issue in iTunes
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Feb 10, '05 12:37:41PM

It's not that simple. The reason for the gaps is that each song is a separate file, and there is a start and stop bit to be read. From what I have read, it's impossible to get zero gap without combining the files. So each file has to be loaded first. I would think that a series of files could be loaded into RAM and played with no gap, but I would imagine Apple would have been able to do this by now if it were possible.

Audio CDs on the other hand do not actually have separate files for each song, even though it looks that way in the Finder (the CD driver does that). CDs stream the audio off the disk, and any gaps between songs were actually placed there intentionally.

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G4/466, 1 GB, Mac OS X 10.3.8



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Watch for a filename length issue in iTunes
Authored by: huzzam on Feb 10, '05 05:26:46PM

So why can't iTunes just start reading the next file ten seconds (say) before the end of the current one, and thereby have the data ready? Even slow notebook hard drives are much faster than the data rate of mp3 music, so they are fully capable of keeping up with this.



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Watch for a filename length issue in iTunes
Authored by: pstadelmann on Feb 11, '05 04:08:30AM

I do use iTunes to listen to continuous music, saved in separate tracks. There's no gap at all if you use crossfade (set to 0). BUT... My music is encoded using Apple Lossless. If you use a lossy format, then the very end of a track and the very beginning of nex track won't match anymore, which causes the gap. That's not iTunes fault at all. In fact, if you burn an audio CD from theses tracks using e.g. Toast, it will also hear gaps.



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Watch for a filename length issue in iTunes
Authored by: ezthrust on Feb 10, '05 09:19:40PM

It IS possible. As anyone who has used WinAmp will tell you. Apple just doesn't care about this feature.



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Watch for a filename length issue in iTunes
Authored by: silentway on Feb 24, '05 03:28:43PM
Yes, indeed, seamless crossfade is possible with compressed audio files, and Apple has not implemented it (yet). There are plenty of pro-level DJ apps that crossfade seamlessly, instead of the non-seamless "fade-out-then-fade-in" method. eg. Traktor DJ Studio 2. They do it by loading the files into memory first.
And, to bring the thread back on-topic, I once hit the 255 character limit in the title of a song (from Flaming Lips' "Soft Bulletin"). (This was with an older iTunes, though.) After entering it manually (not via CDDB), the CD would lock up my Mac. I had to manually hack the iTunes Library file to remove the entry before it would eject!

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Tony Brooke
OS X 10.3.7, G5/1.8 iMac, 1.5GB RAM
http://www.SilentWay.com
http://www.TastyCast.com

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