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No, it does. MP3 has an issue with gapless playback. A one second pause is a player thing, but the format itself does not support truly glitchless playback, bec

No, it does. MP3 has an issue with gapless playback. A one second pause is a player thing, but the format itself does not support truly glitchless playback, because it always stores an integer number of audio blocks, and adds padding at the beginning. This is why nobody should ever use MP3 for e.g. sending around clips for video or audio production - quality issues aside, it also screws up the timing and aligning the start of the track. More modern formats solved this issue by precisely defining the start/end points so decoding can produce an output with precisely the same alignment and number of samples as the input. There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support into it, but the core format cannot do it.

lloeki 5y ago
> the format itself does not support truly glitchless playback, because it always stores an integer number of audio blocks, and adds padding at the beginning. I agree, although arguably the MP3 "core format" has had a number of extensions around so many things that ultimately became de facto standards (vendor extensions if you will). I remember how you could not have precise seeking or current time display with VBR, which now seems to be now largely a solved problem. > There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support One of these is LAME adding gapless stuff at least as far back as 2003, so yes it's a workaround to a format limitation, but it's quite an old one, and fairly stable and known well enough that it's been a while since encoders default to encode with gapless metadata. There's an interesting historical explanation here: https://sourceforge.net/p/lame/bugs/453/#1bd2 https://sourceforge.net/p/lame/bugs/453/#1bd2 I do agree though that the easy path out of it is to just stop using MP3, for this reason and a zillion others ;)

lloeki 5y ago

> the format itself does not support truly glitchless playback, because it always stores an integer number of audio blocks, and adds padding at the beginning. I agree, although arguably the MP3 "core format" has had a number of extensions around so many things that ultimately became de facto standards (vendor extensions if you will). I remember how you could not have precise seeking or current time display with VBR, which now seems to be now largely a solved problem. > There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support One of these is LAME adding gapless stuff at least as far back as 2003, so yes it's a workaround to a format limitation, but it's quite an old one, and fairly stable and known well enough that it's been a while since encoders default to encode with gapless metadata. There's an interesting historical explanation here: https://sourceforge.net/p/lame/bugs/453/#1bd2 https://sourceforge.net/p/lame/bugs/453/#1bd2 I do agree though that the easy path out of it is to just stop using MP3, for this reason and a zillion others ;)