I didn't mean cross fade; I know exactly what gapless playback is
all I was curious to find out was are there certain rules where gapless playback kicks in, or does it apply on all tracks by default.
(In short - how the app knows when to remove gaps and when to treat it like normal files)
Because it was said that encoding it in AAC using Nero doesn't help, but QuickTime encoding works... So... Kinda confusing me.
sent from my mini tractor
Ah, now I understand what you mean.
Lossy audio compression (like MP3, AAC, whatever...) adds a bit of silence at the end and beginning of each track. It's part of how lossy audio codecs work.
In order to remove this silence during playback, modern encoding tools write some additional data to the compressed audio file that says "remove
x milliseconds at the beginning and
y milliseconds at the end" to restore the tracks original length. Players need to look for such data and skip the additional parts accordingly.
If you take an album that has silence at the end of tracks on the CD and convert it to MP3/AAC/whatever, it will add some more silence to it. A player that supports gaplesss playback will remove this additional silence, but keep the original silence that was on the CD.
AFAIK, there is no official standard on how to write this gapless information to the compressed audio file, so different codecs do it in a different way and developers of audio players must take a look at files produced by popular codecs to understand how each codec handles it and implement support for it.
Android 4.2 along with the latest version of the music app supports the format used by Lame MP3, Vorbis and Quicktime AAC (and probably others, these are just the ones I tested). AAC files produced by Nero AAC, which do have gapless data and work fine on other players, are not supported at the moment.
