Help with IPOD Shuffle! How do you get rid of small gaps between tracks?

Question

ie.....To allow Continuous play on mixed cds

Answer 1

When playing music on an actual iPod, this can be acheived by upgrading to iTunes 7 and the matching iPod firmware update, and then setting all of your songs for Gapless Playback (highlight all your music, right click, Get Info, and check the box in the lower right corner for Gapless Playback). Now when you play songs, it'll start seeking out the next song just a touch before the previous song finishes playing, which will let one song flow directly into the next.

As for doing it on a CD, I'm not sure why it would even have the gaps to begin with. The only reason you get it on an iPod is because it'd always wait until it hit the end of one track before even looking for the next one, and the pause is the length of time it takes to find the next track.

On my computer I never once noticed a gap between playback (even on medley tracks that blend right into each other), which means that even before iTunes 7 was released it was enabled to preload songs as the current track is just about to end. When burning to CD, there's no reason why your computer should be encoding a pause between tracks, and CDs should play directly one track into the next without any need to seek anything but the start point. Now, if you're playing the tracks on a CD in random order (like Shuffle mode), there's very little you can do about it. Unless your CD player is designed to cache the song as it plays (so it can continue to play the song even if the read head gets bumped out of allignment), the read head will have to stick with the current track all the way to the end, and then quick skip off to find the start of the next track. Without a player that caches, the player won't have any audio to play while the read head is switching tracks.