[xerxes991]

Having owned 2 Zens and a Sansa Clip, I am thinking of moving to iPod. This is almost entirely due to the issue of Gapless Playback. I read that Rockbox may eventually solve this for my existing players, but meanwhile....

However, I would like to know whether my present library of 50GB assorted MP3 files can be easily used on the iPod and whether these existing tracks will play gaplessly. Or does the gapless feature of iPods only work if the tracks have been ripped using iTunes?

Thanks for any guidance on this.

Xerxes

[Steven]

As Sansa Clip is drag and drop, then your MP3s will play fine on the iPod. You'll have to use iTunes even if only as a glorified link to your iPod should you choose not to use it for playback on your PC, but all the same you should have no issues

As for gapless, that depends on how your MP3 files were ripped. MP3 is not a natively gapless codec and the short of it is some trickery is used to implement it. I rip my MP3s with EAC+Lame and my files are fine on my iPods. Reportedly it is why Sony have yet to be able to bring gapless back after they dropped it with the demise of Atrac because they could not get the coding right

You might be better off taking a portable hard drive or usb stick containing one or two of your albums and road testing an iPod at an Apple store. Don't worry, just explain you are seriously interested in buying and what you are doing. They do not really care what you do in there

[spl23]

All my MP3s were ripped with LAME as VBR files, and they played perfectly as gapless on iPods, so you definitely don't need to have ripped with iTunes for it to work.

The system Apple have used fore detecting gapless music will work as long as the encoder you used didn't add spurious blank frames at the end of a file. Most encoders shouldn't do this, so you should be ok.