I have a problem with a few CDs I have with songs that are supposed to lead into each other, particularly my Agalloch - Pale Folklore and Decapitated - Organic Hallucinosis ones. In both cases there is an extra 2-3 seconds of silence at the end of each track and this prevents the albums from being completely seamless. It's pretty agitating, especially when it's totally clear that the songs are supposed to lead into each other (the feedback from Revelation Of Existence is CLEARLY supposed to introduce Post(?)Organic, but there is 2 seconds between the songs that throws it off. It's also frustrating as hell when listening to She Painted Fire Across The Skyline, considering it's all supposed to be one continuous song).

I thought the CDs were just scratched at first but when I took a look at them they were fine, and then I noticed on iTunes that the audio mp3 files of the songs were all 2-3 seconds longer than what it says on this site, and the extra seconds at the end were all dead silence. It's like this not only on iTunes, but in any CD player or whenever I bring it in the car to listen as well.

Has anyone else had this problem before with these CDs or any other ones? What have you guys done with it in the past? Is it possible to fix safely (without ruining the album), or do I just have to buy another copy of the album hoping that it's ok?

If you own the CDs rip them yourself with Exact audio copy, it should detect and delete gaps between songs, just look up tutorials on youtube and follow this http://blowfish.be/eac/ if there's still a tiny bit of silence before or after a song import them into audacity (google it, it's free) and cut out the silence carefully and re-export.

Does that help the CDs when they play in the CD players too? Or just the audio rips on the computer?

iTunes used to have a checkbox option where you could make songs "part of a gapless album," but it seems to have removed with recent updates. I read something about iTunes detecting whether or not an album is gapless and syncing the songs appropriately so, but apparently this system doesn't work all the time. You may be able to check-off an option removing gaps between songs when importing an album, but I haven't added one to my computer for awhile so I'd have to double-check. There are also crossfade settings in the "playback" tab of the "preferences" menu which I believe remove the gaps, but I've never tried it. Also this would affect your entire iTunes library.

As for CD players, I think it all comes down to the specific model. Some have built-in pauses between songs, and there's likely nothing you can do about that. I've never had any CD player or stereo system that allowed me to customize that. If your CD player has a digital screen showing you the track number and time duration, you'll typically see a ghost track so-to-speak inserted between two songs that has a negative time value, usually 2 seconds (the going rate for song gaps) which counts down like -0.02, -0.01, and leads into the following song.

I wouldn't buy multiple copies of your CDs. You can find a viable option to remove pauses between your audio files, quick & easy or not. Nothing can be done with the CD player creating pauses that I'm aware of, and that's not the fault of your albums.

Just the audio rips, but like the previous post it's pretty much dependent on your CD player not the disk itself.

Yeah I remember that checkbox, it still did nothing though. This has been going on for a while even before the updates to iTunes. I don't think my CD player does it because with other albums with this type of thing it actually works, for example Discordia by Misery Index (Dystopian Nightmares leads seamlessly into Discordia) so I think it might be the albums themselves.

I see what you mean. Pauses or skips aren't uncommon in songs, even if your album looks scratch-free, a few of mine have that ranging from annoying to plain unlistenable and I have to get around to replacing them. It seems odd that would be pauses between each song though, that's not very random. Perhaps the CDs were made with gaps between the songs, which weren't added into the song time? I don't have either of the albums you mentioned so I have no way to be sure.

I happen to have the same Agalloch album it has the same problems as well. Luckily I just manually fixed the problem myself by right clicking the song and go to Get Info>Options and on stop time I reduced the time by 2 or 2.5 seconds so it perfectly transitions to the next song. I cant remember how much I set mine by but try 2 seconds first and if there is still a audible silent gap then 2.5 seconds should definitely fix it. Hope this helps.

It's highly probable that the CD was just encoded that way and there isn't much you can do about it. I have a couple CDs that are that way too even though it's audially obvious that the tracks are supposed to be seamless. I doubt there's much you can do about it other than fixing the audio rips as suggested above and being quick about skipping the last few seconds of the track when you listen to it on a CD player.

Yeah, I did this for Pale Folklore. For all of the songs, I found that there were exactly 2 seconds added; lopping off those 2 seconds made the album flow perfectly.

For the people saying iTunes's "Gapless Album" checkbox didn't work, you're wrong. It does work. You have to check the song that's leading into the next song, not the song that's being led into. Also, it's still there as of iTunes 10. 11 may have removed it, I don't know, I didn't update. In 10 and before it's Under Right Click -> Get Info -> Options.

I found that bad rips or even certain rips won't work with gapless. For the longest time anything lower than 320kbps (including V0) would not let the gapless functionality work on my iPhone when I set it to automatically convert to a lower bitrate when syncing to my phone. They have since updated something or other so that it works now. But still, a bad or low bitrate rip may be the source of your problem.

I used the get info>options thing, it worked well with the rips but I guess I can't do much about it with the CD. Oh well, I usually listen on the computer or my iPod anyways.

The transitions are a little choppy still but I guess I just have to play with numbers.

Also, it seems with the newest iTunes updates the gapless album box has been removed, unless you check it when ripping.

i didn't read the whole thread so i'm just going to throw some thoughts out there. the more you know.jgp

i'm assuming you're burning the CDs. some CD burners don't support gapless playback at all (idk why but i guess that's the case).
if you're talking about the rips then they were probably taken from a burned CD with this problem.
also, some playback devices have this problem. my old mp3 player would have a couple of seconds of lag between tunes as it filled up the buffer (i'm assuming that was the problem).

either way, these problems are easily fixed with a basic waveform editor. either a) cut the silence from the end of the mp3 and save/burn or b) combine all the mp3s into one large track (good for burners that don't support gapless burning or devices that don't buffer songs during the playback of the previous song). with the latter option you wont have the luxury of being able to skip through songs, but i'd say it's a small price to pay if you want flawless playback.

My MP3 player does an automatic fade in/fade out of a fraction of a second for each song, and I don't know how to turn it off. It can be quite agitating, but not agitating enough to start walking around with my discman that doesn't fit into my pocket. First-world problems, I guess.

I'm not burning these CDs, this is happening with the rip from the CDs that I purchased. I'm not burning new ones, so it seems like the problem is on the CD itself