Anyone know how to make your iPod crossfade tracks so they sound like they seamlessley blend into the next track?

This is a big problem on albums that "connect" tracks like Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, Peppers, nearly all Radiohead albums....as there is a big gap in between songs.

I know it can be done on iTunes, but for some reason, it makes no difference when the iPod is standalone. Anyone have a solution? So far, the best i have is to record the entire album into one mp3 file!! Must be a better way...right???

I've read on a few sites that crossfading is not yet available on the iPod yet.

Pity that....really needs that feature, as so many albums blend tracks together.

Very few players do 'gapless' actually. It's a bit of a flaw in the ipod if you listen to albums like those mentioned. Even in itunes it is just a bit of a messy crossfade rather than true gapless play.

It's mainly down to the mp3 format which doesn't allow for it. IIRC some LAME encoded mp3's can have gap information in the tags and OGG supports gapless. Otherwise the hardware needs to analyse and do it for you.

The Rio Karma used to do this brilliantly and so does my iriver h140 - with 3rd party rockbox firmware. I believe that the rockbox firmware is being developed for the ipod too but it's a long long way off at the moment.

I'm sure I've read somewhere that it can be done. You have to do it when you rip the CD though. Have you looked on the iTunes support forum?

I think you need a '(' to show next to the song title for it to work.

EDIT The second message in this thread may be of some help.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread....46214&#1646214

Yeah the way to do it, if you want to listen to albums like that, is rip them as one long track, gapless playback then, and you can put markers in them so you can skip to the next "track".

I tried this with Happiest Days of Our Lives and Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd, but it wouldn't work- as has been said I don't think it's possible.

Rockbox is now available for the iPod - not sure exactly which models but if you have a look at www.rockbox.org it's all on there.

I can't recommend Rockbox enough - it's so much better than the standard firmware on my iriver it's untrue. If I ever have to replace it, I'd consider an iPod now, purely because Rockbox is available for it.

I like the look of some of the features but have bought some songs from I tunes which Rockbox wont play, according to thier website.

Using the "join CD tracks" option in iTunes is the easiest solution. The most annoying thing is that you often don't notice one track runs into the next until you hear it on an iPod - your brain thinks there's a gap but when you hear the gap you realise it wasn't there before. If you see what I mean.

Yeah, it doesn't support DRM, and probably won't ever.

Still, if you install Rockbox you can always choose to boot into the normal firmware if you want to play DRM songs.

I can understand why this might put people off though.