The people who complain about the tiny gaps the most, though, are fans of (a) rock concept albums in the Sgt. Pepper mold and (b) some forms of electronic dance music, both of which rely heavily on seamless track splices. I'd imagine that opera CDs would be similar.
Discussions of this seem to imply that it's partly an issue of limitations of digital music formats such as MP3, which compress music in blocks such that there is usually a tiny silence of unpredictable length at the end of the track. So even if the player anticipates and pre-caches the next track, as the iPod does, eliminating that gap would involve detecting its presence and making timing adjustments, and the software really has no way of knowing how much of it is intentional.
Still, some music software makes the heuristic attempt and the iPod doesn't. You eliminate it in iTunes by selecting crossfade and turning the length of the fade down to zero; rather than anything subtle, I think it may simply be brute-forcing the timing by doing a fraction-of-a-second crossfade, which in some ways is not much better than a sound gap.
no subject
Discussions of this seem to imply that it's partly an issue of limitations of digital music formats such as MP3, which compress music in blocks such that there is usually a tiny silence of unpredictable length at the end of the track. So even if the player anticipates and pre-caches the next track, as the iPod does, eliminating that gap would involve detecting its presence and making timing adjustments, and the software really has no way of knowing how much of it is intentional.
Still, some music software makes the heuristic attempt and the iPod doesn't. You eliminate it in iTunes by selecting crossfade and turning the length of the fade down to zero; rather than anything subtle, I think it may simply be brute-forcing the timing by doing a fraction-of-a-second crossfade, which in some ways is not much better than a sound gap.