Comments on: iTunes Gets a Facelift

By: Eduardo

Eduardo — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 03:23:17 +0000

Nice write-up, Kirk.

Keep up the good work.

By: ebernet

ebernet — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 01:50:37 +0000

…. or you’d play it straight through – China>Rider, Help>Slip>Frank,
Moth>Meat>Buster
You get my point. The point of gapless is a seamless concert. You would not
scrll to the end of a song to have it seamlessly segue to the next one….
I LOVE this feature, and it works REALLy well….

Frank Zappa is an intersting one – he songs don’t segue perse, but the
albums are seamless live shows usually – so this works great.

I was making enhanced podcasts with chapter markers after extracting shows
as a single track. No longer necessary…..
WOOOHOOO!

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 23:10:27 +0000

Very interesting point about the pre-loading. So it’s actually processing the two
files at the same time.

This said, in normal use, you wouldn’t scroll from, say, China Cat Sunflower to
the end to get to I Know You Rider (if that’s the type of music you mean). You’d
just skip China and not care about the gap.

By: ebernet

ebernet — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:08:19 +0000

The analysis is imperfect. Since all my live stuff is labeled as:
yyyy/mm/dd City, ST – venue
I just selected ALL of it and marked it as gapless. That fixed it in iTunes.
On my 5th gen iPod (not the brand new ones) It works (the gapless) but I
found that I have to be careful with the test:
The way it works is, if the album is marked as gapless, it will preload the next
tune starting at a certain point before the end of the song. If I scroll all the
way to the end of a song (say 3 seconds before) it does not have the time to
preload the next song, and it did not work. I needed to figure out what was
going wrong.

This was the only compelling reason for me to upgrade my 60 – I was waiting
for a 120. I don’t need longer battery life, I don’t need a brighter screen, and I
don’t need the search, but I DID need the gapless…

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:53:55 +0000

Yes, this is indeed not clear. I’m awaiting a new iPod to test it.

iTunes analyzes all your songs, so I don’t understand why there is a specific tag.
It seems to play gapless just fine without the tag being set on a computer, and
some people are reporting, as you are, that it doesn’t need to be set for iPod
playback either. So I’m grasping at straws right now…

Again, why have a tag if it’s not needed…?

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:51:42 +0000

No, still can’t browse by composer. Sigh…

As for gapless, it’s difficult enough to implement for any format that there are
no other players that currently handle it.

Regarding classical music, the only thing that might be interesting is the new
Album Artist tag, as opposed to simply Artist. So say you have Leonard Bernstein
and the NYPO as Album Artist, you can have a soloist (say a singer) as Artist, but
still sort by Lenny/NYPO.

By: rh26

rh26 — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:41:09 +0000

Kirk, you said "Now, you can simply tell iTunes that a specific album is
gapless (select the album’s track, select File > Get Info, then select Yes in the
Gapless Album section at the bottom of the Info window)."

But what does the ‘Gapless Album’ option do? I have a live album that plays
in iTunes 7 and on my 5G iPod (I just did the 1.2 firmware upgrade) with no
discernable gap but I don’t have the option checked at all.

And the check box is potentially confusing. It can be checked on a per song
basis, but if two songs fade together which song "needs" checking, the first,
second, or both? (My experience above, for a single test case, is None of the
Above)

BTW, any way to figure which tracks have that checked? iTunes "analyzed" my
library for gapless playback and now I’m curious if it set that flag anywhere at
all…

By: Listener

Listener — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:46:47 +0000

Kirk, Good writeup of iTunes 7 changes.

Has the browsing facility been changed to allow browsing Composer tag values?

Any other changes that affect using iTunes for classical music?

Gapless playback is worthwhile. This seems to be a much bigger deal for MP3 than for FLAC. Is it difficult to achieve in AAC and ALAC?

Bill