MP3 Recording Software? (1 Viewer)

[Sonnie Parker]

I want to burn some mp3's that I have on my computer. These are from CD's I own. I want them to burn the tracks as just as they are transferred off the CD with no gaps between the tracks.

For instance: I have 2 CD's from Pink Floyd Delicate Sound of Thunder and 2 CD's from Pink Floyd PULSE that I have converted from the CD's to my hard drive at 320kbps. They are sitting as mp3's on my hard drive. I want to put them on a disc with no gaps between the tracks. Gaps between each CD are okay but I want none between the songs due to the live recording. I can use my Sonic RecordNow but it converts them to wave files with no gaps. When I try to burn them as mp3's or data files it rearranges the order and places gaps between the tracks.

Is there a program that will record mp3's with no gaps between tracks?

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

I'm not sure what you're trying to do.

If you want to create playable music CD's, you're better off making 1:1 copies of the CD's with your burning software especially as ripping to MP3 is a lossy conversion, ie you're throwing away data that there is no point in throwing away if you're going to create music CD's from it anyway (which always implies a re-conversion back to WAV on the fly by the burning program before it puts the music on a music CD, as a normal music CD cannot contain compressed data and still work in a normal CD player.)

If you want to put the MP3's on one CD fully compressed, just create a new data CD in your burning software, copy the MP3 files there and burn. Playing the MP3's back later will require some sort of player that understands MP3 natively - on a computer, the CD will have a normal file tree and you can play the MP3's with any software that supports MP3 playing, and elsewhere you'll need a player that explicitly supports data CD's with MP3's on it. Some car audio players these days do, for example.

 

[Sonnie Parker]

I'm completely familiar with all that. I'm looking for a program that will allow me to record mp3's with no gaps between the tracks... IOW, there will be no space or no break from one song to the next.

 

[Christian Behrens]

I believe the MP3 format itself will not allow you to easily do that. There was a plugin for Winamp that was supposed to allow gapless playback ('supposed to' because I never tried it), but in terms of putting your MP3 files on a CD there isn't anything else you can do but burn them as data files to a CD-R.

This is a playback issue more than a recording (i.e. burning) issue.

The order rearrangement has probably to do with the file names, meaning they most likely get ordered/displayed/used in alphabetical order. Put numbers and album titles in front of the names to avoid that.

-Christian

 

[Mike Frezon]

A co-worker of mine was recently wondering the same thing. He had copies of the Chronicles of Narnia radio broadcasts (something like 19 CDs). He wanted to record them to mp3s so he could have the entire content on just a couple of CDs and play them on his discman. The one question he had was if there would be the two-second gap between tracks. He didn't want them because it would interrupt the flow of the radio transcription of the books (kind of like how chapter stops in a DVD don't have a pause).

He used Roxio CD Creator 7 and during playback had NO gap between tracks when he played the mp3 CDs on his discman.

Note to Christian: The Roxio software draws a distinction between burning a music mp3 disc and a data disc.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Odd, since they're the same thing.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

I guess the choice of words confused me, "record mp3 with no gaps between tracks". If you use Exact Audio Copy, calibrate it properly for your hardware and encode with Lame, you can get a complete rip of any given track. In other words, you've ripped and encoded to MP3 and you have 100% of the sound data.

I believe the combination of EAC, the Lame encoder (3.90 or higher) and a piece of software that understands the Lame tags (like Foobar2000) can get you gapless playback of MP3's - more or less. That doesn't do the trick for files ripped and encoded without the proper tags.

There is a DSP plugin for Foobar called gapkiller that can help with improperly encoded gapless MP3's, but how well it does or does not work I cannot say.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

don't know of any sure-fire way of solving the problem because MP3 just wasn't designed for it. Winamp gets around it by buffering the tracks but getting consitancy across playback devices is where the real difficulty lies.

The only way I know to create a 'no gaps' MP3 is to just encode the whole album as one long track.

 

[Sonnie Parker]

Yep... I'm afraid that's about the only way to do it. I want be able to skip tracks one at a time but I can fast forward if need be, but then again I usually don't skip tracks anyway... I just let them play through... kinda the idea behind no gaps anyway.

I wonder if the CD text would keep track? I'll just have to see.

I have Roxio Digita Media Center which has the same program as the Easy Creator 7 includes but when I record mp3 music I still get the gaps when played back in my Alpine car headunit.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

MP3 doesn't do gapless by default. As I said, the Lame encoder (possibly only the Lame encoder) does embed metadata into MP3's that, when played with software/a device that understands those does give you gapless playback.

Your problems probably are that the MP3's aren't encoded with Lame and that your Alpine unit doesn't "get" the Lame tags even if they were, so... you may indeed want to go with ripping the whole album as one MP3.

 

[Sonnie Parker]

Yup... I'm using the Lame encoder and the Alpine unit is picking up the data but there's a pause between files.

I can use an mp3 joiner to join the tracks together, rename the ID3 tag... or as you suggest burn the whole CD as on mp3.

Since I've got the tracks already on my computer the joiner works a little faster.

 

[Jason Kirkpatri]

Curious - how do you rip the entire album as one MP3?

 

[Sonnie Parker]

Download the program Exact Audio Copy: (It will automatically start the download by clicking on the link...)

ftp://fx1.hrz.uni-dortmund.de/sw_dat...eac-0.95b3.exe

Or go to their website if you want to read about it first... http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Install the program and follow these steps:

1) Go Action > Copy Range > Uncompressed.
2) Make sure the top slider is all the way to the left and the bottom one is all the way to the right. This gets all of the CD just as it's laid out on the CD itself.
3) Click [OK] and let Exact Audio Copy copy the CD to your hard drive... to wherever you specify.
4) When it's done copying, you should have a large WAV file sitting in the folder you specified.

Now you can convert it to mp3 if you want.

There are probably other programs out there that will do this but this one is completely free for personal use and works really well.

 

[Jason Kirkpatri]