Consecutive tracks

[Tresco]

Hello

Firstly I should say that I have successfully used Audacity to transfer some of my music from cassettes and CDs to MP3.

I have purchased and downloaded an album of 13 tracks of fitness music.
These should play consecutively without any breaks.
However when I transferred them to my MP3 player they don't do that and there is a few seconds break between tracks.
So I thought if I transfer them to Audacity maybe I could get them to play consecutively, export them as one item and then transfer them to my MP3.
But so far I haven't been able to.
Is this possible and if so, how?

[Gale Andrews]

If the album you bought was an MP3 album, the MP3's will play with silence padding due to a limitation in the MP3 format, unless your player supports MP3 gapless playback to compensate for this.

Yes you can join the files and export as one MP3 in Audacity. Then you will only have an added silence at the start and end. Against, you will degrade the sound quality because MP3 encoding is always lossy. To avoid that loss, you would be better to do this in a direct MP3 editor like mp3DirectCut.

If you do it in Audacity, import the files, Ctrl + A to Select All if the files are not already selected, then Tracks > Align Tracks > Align End to End, followed by Tracks > Mix and Render.


Gale

[DVDdoug]

there is a few seconds break between tracks.

MP3 will add several milliseconds to the beginning & end of the tracks, but altogether it should be less than 1/10th of a second (as long as any leading/trailing silence has been edited-out before MP3 compression).

Probably the best solution is to use player software with a crossfade feature (to blend the end of one song into the beginning of the next). Most audio player software also allows you to make a playlist so you can pre-program a sequence of crossfaded songs. (Crossfade with Windows Media Player)

Or, you can make one-long file and crossfade or overlap the tracks. A typical "DJ style" crossfade is an overlap where the 2nd song starts while the 1st song fades-out "naturally" (without any additional fade-out/fade-in). But with one-long file, you'll lose your individual song information (tags) and it's more difficult to find and play a particular song. (If you're making an audio CD, you can have continuous crossfaded music with track markers for each song.)

[Tresco]

Thanks for your replies.
It looks like the mp3DirectCut has worked.
These tracks are designed to blend one into the next and for some reason didn't play like they should.
With the mp3DirectCut I have put them all in order and there is only a tiny little blip when the tracks change