Pause between songs. Can I get rid of it?

[markhuebbe]

I have a bunch of albums that have songs intermixed and continue into the next track. Can the H10 play them back to back without that 1-4 second gap?

[caramelsoul]

Dont think so. I have the same problem with live albums

[seadzz]

Sure you can play them without the gap...live abums too. You need to rip the music as one big file. In otherwords you are joining all the tracks into one. Use Audiacity (google to find) or EAC\CDex as rippers to rip a live album into one big track.

Audiacity is a splitter\joiner\wave editor which is freeware.

sdz

[markhuebbe]

I get the whole album from napster, so I can't join the tracks. Does the firmware update help with this at all?

[seadzz]

If your downloads are in MP3 format and you are cleaver you can join the tracks.

The internet is a big place with tons of information.

sdz

[asdf]

The short answer is no.

I'm a Napster/H10 user as well and I would love to only have a 1 second gap. Most of mine are 5-10 seconds (it seems to degrade over time). I can get the gap down to 4 or 5 seconds by reformatting the H10 and reinstalling the firmware and then reloading all my music.

It seems to be an issue associated to DRM licensing as normal mp3s do not have a gap when loading.

I'm hoping a firmware upgrade (gees it's been a long time since the last one...) will help with this issue.

[Idoeswhatiwants]

No. You're better off not putting them all into one big track as it's not really worth all the effort. It would be nice if the h10 could support rockbox. :P

[aetherion]

The gap between WMA DRM files will be dramatically reduced in a future firmware update. Many mp3 player makers right now suffer from the gap on Napster/Yahoo/Rhapsody tracks b/c the player has to load the DRM license for each file. This process has been streamlined for the next firmwares of many of the players...for example, I believe the Rio Carbon firmware does not suffer this problem to the extent that others do b/c their firmware just rolled out.

As for when this will happen? No clue, but within a month is my guess.

As far as true gapless playback for mp3 files, the Rio Karma (now deceased) and maybe a 1 or 2 other players have been able to pull that off, but don't expect any other players to implement that feature b/c it's very hard to do...not worth the developer resources to accomplish it (so says the Rio guys).

[DreamTactix291]

Doing gapless for LAME mp3 or anything else that supports gapless isn't that hard provided your CPU has any type of decent clock speed. LAME mp3s have an enc_delay and enc_padding value. All you have to do is have a decoder that reads them and skips those sections and buffer ahead into the next track so you get a smooth transition. For formats that are truly natively gapless (they don't add samples) you just have to buffer ahead to play files truly gapless.

I never said it was really really easy to do but for an experienced programmer it really can't be that hard. Don't count on iRiver ever doing it though.

Post #1337

[pacemkr]

To answer original thread, you cannot achieve gapless in your situation.
The only way would be to join tracks into one.
However, that is out of the question becuase you get albums from Napster, which ofcourse means that the songs are DRM protected. Which in turn means that you cannot modify them (ie. join many into one).

I am 99% sure on this. Sorry.

[aetherion]

You cannot join the songs if they are subscription (NapsterToGo)...you' ll just have to wait for the newer firmware (gap will be less than 1 sec, but still there). If the songs were purchased as singles or an album, you can burn them to CD, re-rip, then join...but that's a pain in the butt.

But I do also 2nd seadzz's recommendation of Audacity if you decide to go through such effort.

[markhuebbe]

Thanks guys. I wouldn't mind a gap of 1s or less, but the 4-5 seconds now really stops the flow.

[codedude]

Just curious, have you gone into the settings menu under Sound and set the Fade In setting to OFF? That makes the gap seem a lot shorter, IMHO. Hope this helps.

[kaiserd]

Is this 1-5 second gap of silence existant with all types of files or just DRM media from pay sites? For instance, regular non-licensed files ripped from CD's into MP3 format, do they still lag in between songs? Someone please reply to this - I must know

[withak]

I hear it when I listen to plain old mp3 files. It's probably because the firmware doesn't "look ahead" far enough and thus doesn't start reading in the next track until the first one is finished. Part of it is because of the file also. Only mp3s encoded using LAME and played using software that can read the special tags LAME puts there can actually be gapless. DRM may add to the gap also, I don't know.