How to do gapless for Apple Music / Bit-Perfect

So I went to listen to Pink Floyd’s album The Final Cut. I really wanted to thoroughly enjoy it, but my software setup was inserting a little “pop” of silence between tracks - I can’t believe how irritating it was. I immediately blamed it on Apple Music, but thought for sure they had long ago worked out gapless records so they work in iTunes (now Apple Music). I went out and Googled and found lots of complaining about “gapless not working,” but it all seemed to be about the iPhone AM, not the desktop Mac version. Then I saw an article on the Bit-Perfect website. Read it if you want, but basically there’s a problem between iTunes and Bit-Perfect that creates the glitch. I prefer to use Bit-Perfect to make sure AM isn’t screwing around with the data, but I LOVE how AM manages my library, makes it easy to change things like tags, etc. So what I did was to create a single long file made up of all the tracks. I use Amadeus Pro as an audio editor - powerful, cheap ($60) and easy to use. Takes a bit to string the files together, but it gets quicker as you go, and the end result is truly seamless. I guess I could probably use JRiver or another program, but nothing in my opinion comes close to Apple Music for organizing the way I want it.

Gapless seems to be such a blind spot on some software (still!, in 2023!!), I can only assume that most of the developers listen only to one-off tracks.

I mean, it was a problem in the late 90s (I, too, ripped such albums to one long file, MP3 as it was then) to avoid the glitch, but that was on a Pentium 90 for goodness sake.

The problem is that the gapless information is in the control data of the CD, so your software has to know A) that it’s intended to be gapless and B) to set up playback in the software so it plays gapless. I guess given that probably about 1.3% of albums are gapless, jumping through all those hoops seems dumb - except for those of us who actually CARE about gapless (same with our teeth). As I said, iTunes had it figured out, but the Bit-Perfect add-in doesn’t like what iTunes feeds it apparently. The method I mentioned requires a little knowledge of audio files, how to copy and paste, etc., but it’s not hard.

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