How to get the least gap possible on MP3 CD format?

So, I have a bit of a problem. I'm trying to find a solution to playing music in my car without having to futz about much with things like changing discs while driving. I thought the solution would be an FM transmitter, but after the initial period in which I tested it, the interference it would pick up was just a little too overbearing and annoying. So, this left me to have to make CDs again- but I thought this time I'd burn Mp3 CDs rather than audio to maximize the amount of music I could put on a disc for long drives.

Knowing the capacity of a CD-R is 700 MB, I thought I'd try and fill it to about just under capacity- not maxing out the space but still burning a lot. The discs I made were about 9 hours each, according to iTunes. They burned just fine, with no issues. However, when I tried to play them in the car, there was a very long silent gap between each song, which I figured must be the player reading each track individually. I was pretty disappointed, to say the least.

I borrowed some Mp3 CDs that my father had made years ago for comparison, since I didn't remember any unusual gaps in those. They were hours shorter than mine. Two hours or so as opposed to my nine.

So this leaves me wondering- did I burn too much music, even if it did fit onto the disc and it was under capacity? What's the longest an Mp3 CD can be before the gaps between songs start to get very long? How do I make one with almost no gap?

Ideally I'd like to have a disc that can go fairly long without changing that I can put multiple albums onto. Is it possible?

 

Just need a good CD player that can cache file structure and is capable of MP3 gapless playback. There are very few of such players. iRiver was the one, but it is not a car player. I have a Panasonic CD player that has gaps between MP3s, but they are not THAT long, maybe half a second.

Why do you want to burn MP3 on a CD, when you can have an SD card that fits literally hundreds of CDs in Redbook quality? If you have a standard DIN-sized device in your car, replace it with the one that has SD-card slot.

 

If your player leaves inserts gaps, it'll take a firmware update to fix that problem. The only to get around this is to rip you CDs as a single file then use a cue file to index the song location, assuming the player support them.

 

Is a Bluetooth transmitter an option?

 

From what I understand, gaps are part of the MP3 format itself. It isn't supposed to play gapless by design. That's why I do what you mentioned to get a gapless album in the MP3 format, rip it as a single file.

 

The LAME encoder can rip gapless MP3 files, but only if played back with the right software.

Last decade I was using a Sansa Fuze music player. Originally it would not play MP3s gapless, but they eventually released new firmware that would allow it. Again, it only worked with files ripped with LAME.

 

One reason for burning to CD over using a memory card is some devices have trouble reading the files on the card. I had that problem with my car stereo and my bedroom stereo, both accept a USB thumb drive.

I copied the music files to the thumb drive and inserted it into my car stereo. Then I found that it would skip some songs, and would play them in a different order than intended (it wasn't set to random) which made it a headache when listening to audiobooks. I had a similar problem with my bedroom stereo, where some songs would be skipped for some reason. Nothing I did could get the songs to play reliability and in the right order (including burning them one-by-one in the same order as the track numbers, renaming the files, auto numbering the songs, converting the files to CBR MP3 files, using my music management program to copy the files to the drive, andj manually dragging and dropping the files one-by-one to the drive).

In the end, I went back to burning CD-Rs. While a CD-R doesn't hold as much as a USB thumb drive it is reliable. Plus, I can use my music management program (MediaMonkey) to burn the tracks to a CD. It is as easy as just selecting the file and using MediaMonkey's CD Burning Utility to burn the files to a disc (it can burn them as a Red Book CD or as a MP3 CD). With a burned CD every song plays and in the right order, and it still allows me to put about 80-100 songs on one CD in MP3 format (I burn them as VBR at the highest quality).

 

So, it is not the issue of CDs being more reliable or predictable, it is the issue of your software (or firmware). Some players sort the files based on metadata, not on filename. You may want to look for a setting that selects sorting by filename. If there is none, you may want to try to update track IDs/Numbers in your MP3 files to follow the order you want.

 

The FM transmitter I bought has a bluetooth option for connecting devices to it via bluetooth, but the car stereo itself does not have bluetooth. So there's no possibility of a direct connection.

I could get a new stereo entirely (which likely would have bluetooth support and an AUX port), but that's a bit out of my price range at the moment.

 

So far the only way there is for me to use SD-cards or USB sticks in the car is the FM transmitter I bought, which has those ports in it and gets plugged into the 12v outlet in the center column of the dash. It was a good solution but the interference was too much. Had I any USB ports built into the car I'd use those but it's too old for that.

 

Yes, I found recently that the current LAME converter (3.100) can make gapless MP3 files.

 

@Solitaire1 has given the answer already. Adding to this: If you have albums where seamless play between tracks is relevant (say a live concert, or a conept album with tracks blending into each other), do not rip into individual files, but leave it as one large file. This will play seamless by definition. The MP3 format can't play gapless. Some players can be convinced to kinda-sorta blend over the gaps, but apparently yours isn't one of those. Also the resulting playback will not sound exactly the same as the album even if itworks.

 

There is a related problem I've often had when using a thumb drive with my car stereo and my bedroom stereo: some of the files are skipped, they don't play in the right order, and sometimes the player will lock up. Nothing I did (such as renaming the files to include track number, making sure the metadata is correct, making sure that the files are in the correct format [including a compatible bitrate]), I found it so frustrating that that I ended up returning to burning the files to CD-Rs. They are reliable, and making one is as easy as selecting the files in MediaMonkey and burning them to disc.

 

An update on the above. I recently discovered what may have been a factor in the above issue, and I think it may help others with a similar issue.

I was having an issue with the song "The Night Has A Thousand Eyes" by Connie Smith. I have multiple versions of the song and on my digital audio player (a Sony NW-A55 Walkman) all of them are together in the list of songs...with the exception of the Connie Smith version. The other versions were sorted in the "T" songs while the Connie Smith version was sorted with the "N" songs. However, when I view the Song List in MediaMonkey they are all sorted together with the "T" files.

Due to a hunch, I decided to check the song's tags in MP3Tag and discovered that it had "NightHasAThousandEyes" in the Title Sort Tag, while the others had "TheNightHasAThousandEyes" in the Title Sort Tag. A further check of my entire music library found that some of the songs had information in the following tags:

• Title Sort
• Artist Sort
• Album Sort
• Album Artist Sort

I use MediaMonkey 4 to manage my music collection and it doesn't show those tags although the data is there. Looking at the metadata in those tags, I recognized that they came from previous programs I'd used to management my music collection, including iTunes, MediaGo, and Music Center for PC (my music collection has traveled a number of times from one music management program to another) which do have the ability to update the sorting information. I also found a number of other metadata items that I didn't need (such as from iTunes).

Deleting the data in the above tags had the songs appear in the correct order on my player. It seems like my Walkman orders songs based on the information in the above sorting tags over the actual data where it exists (Title Sort over Title...and so on), so by deleting the sorting information it sorts the songs based on the main tag.

Due to this, I'm going to start regularly checking my music library with MP3Tag to ensure that the metadata my tags are correct and unneeded metadata is deleted.

I hope this helps.

 

What's your budget?

 

USB car stereos on Amazon US start at around the $20-25 mark.

Is this out of your budget?

 

I've never used Media Monkey to play my music files... I use Radio Station Automation software to play my WAV. files. I use their overlapping feature, 4 seconds is a suitable overlap for a smooth gapless transition.

Another way to keep the gaps to a minimum is to go to the original folder you have all your music files in...
Run each track through your Audio Editing software.. With the track's waveform in front of you, DELETE any silence before the intro and at the end.
If the track has an overly long fade out, you can manually make it a quicker fade even if it means chopping 3 seconds off the end.
I thought all digital Music Players had fading and overlap features.

 

This thread is six months old, so you can stop bumping.

Solution: Rip the whole CD as a single audio file without tracks and encode that to MP3 VBR.

Seems as thought the original post had a mp3 player that pauses between each track when processing a long list of files. The gaps are more about how many files and folders are in the directory of a data CD.

 

Problem solved!