Why is necessary to de-gap your MP3 files? Why aren't they just naturally de-gapped?

I don't know why, but they're not. I think that the people who write MP3 encoders must just not be Pink Floyd fans. I only have experience with the Fraunhofer encoder, but it inserts whole and partial frames of silence at the beginning and end of the MP3 files it creates. I could have a set of perfectly seamless .WAV files sitting on the hard disk, but when they get converted to MP3, there are silent bits there. You can even see the silence when you look at the frames in a binary editor.

I asked Fraunhofer about it and one of their techs basically said, "yeah it does that," but didn't give me any detailed information as to why it happens.

I have not tried the VBR encoder in AudioCatalyst yet, and no one has ever answered my questions about whether or not it creates MP3s without gaps.

Anyway, the only solution I've found is to trim the frames at the song boundaries. The problem is that the silence doesn't end exactly on a frame boundary, so you have to do trial-and-error trimming, listening to the new gap with each attempt. I got so sick of doing this by hand that I wrote a piece of software to help automate the trial-and-error process. It's at my home page if you're interested in looking at it. The software's README.TXT file has more details on why it's needed.


-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.