Downloads - mind the gap

[Roslynmuse]

I'm sure there must be a thread about this somewhere... ...however...

I'm new to buying downloads of recorded music, and treated myself at the weekend to a hefty chunk of Schumann piano music via Presto in FLAC format.

I decided to burn some of the pieces to CD to play in the car. Fine for when the tracks are of separate pieces that would naturally be separated by silence. However, some of the continuous movements are split into separate tracks.

There is an option on my CD burning software (Nero) to remove the gaps between tracks but I'd only want to do that when continuity is being compromised as just described, not as a matter of course, and it looks like an all-or-nothing option as far as I can make out.

Plus, if listening on my computer, how do I get round this problem? Given that the cost of the download was not bargain-basement, I wasn't expecting to encounter a problem that I used to get with Windows Media Player or on the cheap version of Naxos Music Library I get via my institution.

Any tips, wrinkles, work-arounds?

[Dave2002]

Are there many pieces to be joined together? If only a few than you could try audacity It’s perhaps not ideal, but the new versions should be able to import flac files. You might have to be careful lining up the pieces to make the joins good. Some DAWs could probably do a better job, or at least do the work more easily, but you might find yourself involved in file conversions to get the DAWs to import the source files.

[Roslynmuse]

Thanks, Dave. In this case it probably does not involve a huge number of tracks. However, if I bought a Wagner opera and then found it was basically a do-it-yourself Ikea kit I would resent the time spent stitching! I'm amazed that I've never read about this aspect of the world of downloads before now!

[MrGongGong]

I think what you need to do is to have track marks without gaps?
Nero should do that (or it used to ?) and you should be able to edit the marks and have gaps if needed etc

[Roslynmuse]

Thanks, MrGG - what's the difference between track marks and the downloaded track files? I put the files into Nero to create the CDs and hadn't really thought about gaps and continuity...

[johnb]

Roslynmuse,

FLAC downloads are expected to be played without adding further gaps between any of the tracks - in my experience any necessary silences or pauses between movements are already included in the files. So I would just switch off the 2 second gaps (that Nero inserts by default). Assuming that your car CD player doesn't insert gaps itself (weirdly not unknown) the CD should then play the tracks correctly.

[Roslynmuse]

Ah, I didn't know that. I'll try turning off the default two-second Nero gap and see what happens.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Strauss’s Alpine symphony can so often be divided into 22 separate short movements by these annoying gaps. Sometimes attempts to eliminate them results in over-compensation, over clipping the gap thereby skipping some of the music.

[MrGongGong]

Thanks, MrGG - what's the difference between track marks and the downloaded track files? I put the files into Nero to create the CDs and hadn't really thought about gaps and continuity...

Track marks can be put in the middle of the file to allow you to navigate to different parts of the piece.
So you could (and I think this is quite easy with Nero) put a mark to allow you to skip to a particular place
I think most software (I now use Toast) puts a 2-second gap by default but you can change that as other folks have said.

Gapless playback can be a problem on some devices. I know that my old iRiver MP3 player didn't allow it unless you installed different firmware which did etc

There are many idiosyncrasies in these things (different CD players will play different types of "Random" for example) so the best way is to simply try it out.