Burn gapless audio CDs from mp3s

[gottogo99]

I have some live albums in mp3 format. When burning these to an audio CD, there is a short but audible gap between tracks. Ideally there shouldn't be.

 

They are encoded using LAME, which adds some type of information on padding and delay. When played back in foobar2000, there are no audible gaps between songs.

 

I gather that if I had Nero (re)installed, I could burn the mp3s to an audio CD in foobar using its burninate plugin, and have a gapless CD. I don't want to reinstall Nero.

 

Since ImgBurn now checks each audio file before burning, is there some way it can use the information saved by the LAME encoder to eliminate gaps when burning audio CDs from LAME mp3s? Thanks.

[blutach]

Have you tried making it no gaps when making your cue sheet?

 

Regards

[gottogo99]

Have you tried making it no gaps when making your cue sheet?

 

Regards

The cue sheet has no gaps. The problem is that mp3s don't always end on a CD frame boundary (1/75 of a second). The resulting tiny gap between tracks, maybe 0.01 second, is the problem. However, there is information stored in the mp3, when encoded by LAME, which somehow enables certain programs to play back without any gaps. I want to burn without gaps.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

If it doesn't provide enough data to fill the final sector ImgBurn will zerofill it regardless. That's all the digital silence there should be though if the decoder is accurate enough.

 

I don't really know how to do anything other than what it's doing now.

[jeff_nz]

This is probably not the answer you're looking for but if you highlight all your mp3's in foobar2000, right click and select Convert > Convert to Album Images with Cuesheets or Chapters, and choose WAV as the output format, I believe the resulting wav file will be gapless and you can simply load the cue file it produced into ImgBurn complete with CD Text from your mp3's.

 

(This should work with LAME encoded files that have the delay and padding information in the header.)

[gottogo99]

This is probably not the answer you're looking for but if you highlight all your mp3's in foobar2000, right click and select Convert > Convert to Album Images with Cuesheets or Chapters, and choose WAV as the output format, I believe the resulting wav file will be gapless and you can simply load the cue file it produced into ImgBurn complete with CD Text from your mp3's.

 

(This should work with LAME encoded files that have the delay and padding information in the header.)

Correct, that wasn't the answer I was looking for . But it is a solution that would probably work (haven't tried it). I was hoping for one built into ImgBurn without converting to WAV or FLAC or anything else. Ah well, thanks anyway.

[jeff_nz]

I was hoping for one built into ImgBurn without converting to [...]

That's what I figured.

Edited May 8, 2008 by jeff_nz

[gottogo99]

I can confirm that it is possible to burn gapless audio CDRs from mp3 files properly encoded by LAME.

 

It worked using foobar2000 with its burninate plugin installed, which requires certain Nero files to be installed. Nero 6 and 7 both work, don't have 8 so don't know. Nero Lite and Micro (unofficial versions of 7) do not work as they don't have the necessary files.

 

It would be nice if ImgBurn could be used in lieu of Nero for the burninate plugin. I realize that's far beyond the scope of ImgBurn.