Quote:
Originally Posted by jorgelito
What's "gapless playback"?
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The MP3 format, unfortunately, specifies a 3-second gap between tracks on an album. There are some albums that are constructed to flow from one track to the next seamlessly, and adding a 3-second gap ruins the album. Ogg and other formats don't suffer from the same problem, but some MP3 players insert gaps anyway.
The Rio Karma not only respects the gapless playback of supported formats, it also can remove the gaps from MP3 format files during playback! So if you have a Pink Floyd album in MP3, it will work just fine on the Karma, but you'll hear pauses between tracks on the iPod and other players.
This is a non-issue for anyone who doesn't have gapless albums (or who doesn't listen to tracks in album order). I don't really know how frequent those albums are in the wild, but I have many that are ruined by gaps. They're mostly "theme" albums, like Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, almost anything by Pink Floyd (esp.The Wall), any rock operas (Tommy, S.F. Sorrow)... If you have anything like that, it might be a problem for you!
Bingle
Edit: I did some research, and the iRiver 100-series players support this with a firmware upgrade. The 300-series probably support it out of the box.