Why do my mp3s play better on win98?

joey1211 · 13 Mar 2006 at 10:01

I have my entire cd collection ripped as mp3s on an XP machine. Decided to copy the entire collection to the family pc running win98.

Listening to the Beatles' Abbey Road album and then some Pink Floyd on the win98 pc, the mp3s played flawlessly without any silent gaps between the tracks. I was using winamp lite.

Lagz · 13 Mar 2006 at 10:31

They don't?

Small gaps between tracks is an inherant property of the mp3 compression and decompression algorithms, which is why (almost) all mp3 players (hardware and software) leave small gaps between them. It can be corrected by doing hacky stuff like starting to decompress one just before the other has finished etc. Maybe winamp light has this feature.

joey1211 · 20 Apr 2006 at 20:59

Well having read all the winging and the moaning about delays in the mp3 format, winamp lite does it for me. Playing any album which "bleeds" each song into each other, winamp lite plays flawlessly. Standard winamp inserts a 1/4 gap between each song. Explain that!!!

Scythe · 20 Apr 2006 at 23:57

I like it how iTunes starts playing the next song when the current song is like on the last 3 secs so i quietly slips in, so no gaps between songs

Caged · 20 Apr 2006 at 23:59

joey1211 said:
winamp lite plays flawlessly. Standard winamp inserts a 1/4 gap between each song. Explain that!!!

They're different players?

Vegetarian · 21 Apr 2006 at 18:00

some players play gapless - most do not!

georges · 22 Apr 2006 at 20:57

I think WMP has this (or winamp forgotten which one. probably winamp).

Basically you can tell it to cache the start of the next song so its got no discernable gaps between.

EDIT:

I think this is it:

options ->
preferences ->
Output plugins ->
select "direct sound output" ->
click configure at bottom of prefs window ->
Go to buffering tab on direct sound config window ->
"buffer ahead on track change"

Nothing to do with win98 :/

EDIT:

Yeah, that seems to work. It's on 500ms and when I tried track 2 fading into 3(Essentially meant to be no join at all) of Mars Volta's Deloused in the comatorium, there's no gap whatsoever.

Where the cursor is is the start of track 3. That's just using waveout of the soundblaster live 5.1 card I have(Using KXproject drivers) as the recording source in Audacity. As you can see, No gap.

I'm on xp pro