duhhh,
being an apple fan myself i was amazed that none of you had heard of the new sonnet battery for ipods
to you james potter im sorry you bought a new battery from apple you could have gotten the sonnet for like 25 bucks and had a 20 hour battery life,
o well,
and if you set it to play the abulms instead of searching then it is closest to
gapless, because it doesnt have to go look at the cache
duhhhh
Yeah! 
My take: The iPod is designed, implemented and used as a fashion accessory first and a DMP second. Fashion accessories come and go by the season, and most are only around for a year or two before they’re replaced (or so I’ve been told by my “hipster” friends). Hence, by design, the iPod doesn’t need to be usable past a couple years…
Either that or Apple wants to capitalize even further on their sales by requiring you send the product back to the factor for routine maintenance. Given the laziness of the general public it seems they’re okay with having someone else doing the work for them… if you can afford to blow $300 on a trendy toy you shouldn’t have much problem coughing up another $50 up the road.
Ferchrissakes at least 50% of people can’t even put a spare tire on their car, why ask them to do a battery change in a delicate device? 
One of the problems JC is that most popular encoding formats introduce small length changes in the audio tracks upon compression & decompression. When these are played together (even with the next track buffered and played immediately after the previous) there are still gaps of silence between them. I refer you to an unfortunately short wiki article on the subject.
Unless a newer player starts to support a newer encoding format that removes these issues, then it’s going to be a little while before you can get rid of your discman! I also am very annoyed when I play Floyd or Bad Religion, and there are pauses (even very slight ones) between tracks.
Loose.
Another Apple apologist. The Sonnet battery was announced yesterday. I like how they have to ship special tools with the battery so you can do the replacement and ship a CD-ROM with a video showing you how to replace a battery. So I suspect many people are going to end up buying the battery for $30 to $40 and then end up paying a geek to install it for them. Either that or they’ll end up damaging or ruining their iPod in the process.
Yes, you can fake gapless playback on the iPod by ripping an album as one long track. That gives you the effect of perfect gapless playback, but at the expense of making it impossible to skip to any individual song or track on the album and at the expense of being able to see the name of the exact song being played. So if I ripped a CD of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as one long track I would not be able to look at the display and see what movement was playing at the moment. I would also be unable to jump directly to the 4th movement (the 4th movement is pretty killer). That’s not a solution I can accept.
Info on gapless playback - MP3 players: Buyer Beware
Yes, gapless playback of MP3s is not trivial because MP3s are not designed to support gapless playback. But it can be done. The Rio Karma did gapless playback of MP3s. The Foobar2000 audio player does perfect gapless playback on my PC. It’s not an impossible problem to solve. It takes some extra processing power on the device and the decoding chips that the MP3 players use need to support it. It’s not impossible to do.
no, no,
if you go to music>albums then play it that way, you can still go to different songs and it is almost gapless because it doesnt have to access the cache, it is on cnet somewhere, or one of those other tech websites,
not my beloved gizmodo though, some other one, it is under like getting the most out of your ipod or something
I checked the iPod Lounge to see if there was anything new. Threads from just a month ago were saying that there is still no gapless playback on iPods. The gap is now smaller at 0.2 to 0.5 seconds. But it’s still a gap and that size of a gap would be very noticeable in music.
There is a new feature called the Chapter Tool. That may be what you’re thinking about. It’s intended for audio books but has been used with music. It only works on AAC files at this point. It wasn’t clear what the plan is for MP3 support. It works by ripping the entire album as one BIG file. Then it adds proprietary chapter marks so it can skip to specific points in the BIG file. There were issues with regards to quality in the review I read about the Chapter Tool. It seems to have been designed for audio books and low bitrate audio rather than high quality high bitrate stereo music.
I refuse to do that. It is proprietary to the iPod. Only works on AAC and the chapter format is proprietary. So you take the time to rip your albums and then chapterize them and then for all that work you’ve just locked yourself into the iPod for as long as you want to listen to that file. Are you going to rip that album again if your next DAP is not an iPod? I refuse to lock myself in to a specific player like the iPod or any other brand. That’s why I rip to MP3 because MP3 is the most universal format. It will work on almost every player. It will work now and it will work in 10 or 20 years. I want to rip the files now and have them work 20 years from now. MP3 will do that. Apple’s solution will keep me locked in to the iPod for the next 20 years. No thanks.
The only portable and universal solution is to have the MP3 players support true gapless playback. Everything else is a hack or proprietary. And unfortunately right now there are no current MP3 players that do gapless playback of MP3s. The Rio Karma did it several years ago but they’re now out of business. It is possible. It’s just that no one is doing it now. Apple should be a leader and advance gapless playback. They know how to do it. I just don’t think they want to.
Ahhh… I can’t get the bolts unscrewed on the back of my broken seat, so no usable unicycle and it’s too late to head out for unicycle hockey. 
I don’t have any idea how I’m supposed to change the battery in my ipod shuffle when it dies, anyone know how?
A quick little Google search and I found an MP3 player that is supposed to do gapless playback of MP3s. It’s the RCA Lycra RD2765. Unfortunately it suffers from the same battery problem as the iPod and CNet gave it bad marks on sound quality. Sound quality is key for me so that’s a deal killer. At least there is another player out there doing gapless playback. Cool. Now we need more. And hopefully one that gets top marks in sound quality.
Wow! Check this out. Sony CDs are using rootkit techniques to hide their DRM. So you buy a Sony CD. When you play it on your Windows computer it installs something akin to a rootkit. Wow! That is exactly why I ranted a few posts back. You cannot trust those media companies. They’re installing software on your computer deep in the system (deep in the OS) that can make the computer less stable or even completely unstable. What happens when you try to play that CD on a future 64 bit version of Windows? Will it totally crash the computer?
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html
Rant, rant, rant, rant, rant…
I’m never buying a CD from Sony
That is exactly why I haven’t bought a CD from any label that puts DRM on their CDs (err, excuse me, music disks) in 4 years.
Holy crap, I just went to MD and it solved all my problems, holds as much music as an ipod and can change my own batteries and reburn the disks over and over. Seemed like the answer I was looking for.