Re: Best tool for splitting long MP3's at frames?

Brent-

LAME offers a series of --nogap command-line arguments that will let you
do gapless encoding for a set of files such as those from an entire
album. I've never tried it myself, but I assume that instead of padding
the last frame with zeroes, it goes ahead and starts using data from the
next track. This would accomplish what you want and be a LOT less work
than slicing the files manually.

Hope this helps some,

- Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Turtle Beach Audiotron User Forum
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brent Aliverti
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 1:04 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [AT] Best tool for splitting long MP3's at frames?

The MP3 format endodes each fractional second of song information into
individual "frames". As such, the last bit of information in the song
often only partially fills the last frame. The rest of that last frame
is zero'd out. For this reason, songs that are meant to flow into each
other will have perceptible gaps in them, even if the playback device
does a good job of pre-buffering the next track.

Such partial frames can theoretically be eliminated by encoding the
entire "album" or "album side" as one long MP3 and then using a tool to
split the long MP3 into individual MP3s, only allowing splits at frame
boundaries. Has anyone had experience doing this, and if so, what is the
best tool to use?
Will it make a difference for the Audiotron...IE will eliminating
partial frames yield truly gapless flow from one song to the next (for
albums like Dark Side of the Moon for instance) or are there still some
limitations of the buffering process that will insert a noticeable gap
regardless?

As it is, Audiotron is really great at minimizing the gaps between
songs.
I'm just trying to see if it can be even better. :-)

Cheers
Brent