ephraim's Profile

Yeah, like I said, there are two distinct problems with the iPod's track playback: the gaps *between* tracks, and the gaps *within* tracks. The latter can be remedied with a proper buffer, and so can the former, albeit with a few tweaks to detect and remove bits of silence (as you described). Neither are particularly difficult problems to solve, engineering-wise, as has been proven many times over by other MP3 players on the market — Apple really has no excuse.

Just to clarify the whole gaps-between-tracks issue... Right now, there are two glaring errors in the way the iPod handles tracks. First and foremost, it isn't capable of playing tracks back to back without an audibly silent gap inbetween (as mentioned in the article). This renders any album with song transitions nearly unbearable to listen to, especially mixed electronica sets and live shows. Now, a lot of people have tried to work around this annoyance by ripping their albums as one long, unbroken MP3 (using the handy new feature in iTunes), so as to preserve the seamless nature of their albums. Doing so eliminates the ability to jump directly to specific tracks on the album, and you don't get any song title listing as a result either, but at least the thing is listenable. Unfortunately, Apple was dumb and made a RAM buffer that doesn't work. See, in order to keep the hard drive's activity to a minimum (preserving battery life), the iPod is designed to load a bunch of song information into its built-in RAM; it can let the HD stop spinning yet continue to play music for a while. The concept behind the buffer is that sometime before it runs out of song information (about 4 or 5 tracks worth, roughly), the HD will spin up, re-fill the RAM with the next few minutes of audio, then spin down again. But it doesn't do that. It waits until after the buffer has run out of audio to spin up the hard disk, creating a lengthy (1-2 seconds) pause in playback while it does so. Most people don't notice this, because most tracks are smaller than the RAM buffer (which is 32MB), and the iPod gets a chance to refill it at the end of each track anyway (see above). But if you've got anything longer than about 15-20 minutes (depending on your MP3's bitrate) -- say a particularly lengthy symphony, or an entire album ripped into one file (as provided by iTunes itself!) -- then you get horrendous interruptions in playback. Why was Apple dumb? I have no idea. What I do know is how to code a proper buffer, and it's perfectly obvious that they could (and should!) fix it in the near future. I hope that helps make some sense of it all...