Audacity Forum

I'm using Windows 10 with Audacity 2.1.1 to digitize vinyl records and I love it.

I looked around the manual but could not find out if I can add labels markers to a continuous audio track without creating audible "gaps" in the sound.

I mostly put the files on a stick or portable player to listen to them on the go so CD burning programs aren't really what I'm looking at.

Any way to do this?

And as always, thanks to the developers of this program. Everyone who uses it owes you.

Joe

There's two parts to this question: 1) the audio format. 2) the media player.

MP3 and some other "lossy compression" formats do not define the "encoder delay", which means there is always a bit of silence at the start of the files. This makes gapless playback tricky, but some players are able to fudge their way around the problem, either by using special metadata tags to specify a start-point offset (not currently supported in Audacity), or by simply making a short crossfade between tracks (overlapping the tracks slightly so that the "gap" disappears). Lossless formats (such as WAV, FLAC, AIFF) don't have this problem. Ogg Vorbis (an open source "lossy compression" format) does not have this problem.

Some players are simply not capable of gapless playback. Some players require that "gapless playback" is turned on (a setting). Some players can play lossless formats without gaps but can't play lossy formats without gaps. Some players "insert" a gap by default and "may" have a setting to specify the length of the gap.