Some people are perfectly happy with "near-gapless" playback, where there's just a small click between tracks, and some heathens people are even happy with players which insert two-second pauses between tracks.Ī wide range of music can be affected by non-gapless playback.ĭance albums are often continuous pieces of music. How much, if at all, you care about gapless playback depends on the music you listen to, on whether you tend to listen to complete albums or individual tracks, and on your personal tolerance for the problem itself. Unfortunately, many digital audio players fail to do gapless playback.
Gapless playback is not a feature the lack of gapless playback is a bug, the same as it would be a bug to add a click or pause in the middle of a track. It can be useful when using a player's shuffle-tracks feature but is usually undesirable when playing an album. Crossfading is when the next track starts before the end of the current track, with the end of the current track fading out as the start of the next track fades in. It can be useful in a handful of cases - think "secret tracks" at the end of albums - but also often goes wrong and removes quiet or silent portions of music which are actually wanted.Ĭrossfading is not gapless playback. Gap removal is when passages of silence on an original CD are removed during playback. Unwanted pauses or clicks between tracks can ruin pieces of music which are split across multiple tracks, especially in cases where the music is not silent at the split points.Ī gapless digital audio player will neither insert nor remove silence between tracks instead it will play an album exactly the same as a CD player would play the original disc.
Gapless playback is when a series of audio tracks are played seamlessly, one after another, without any pauses or clicks in between. Digital Audio Players: Gapless Playback Contents