Gapless ripping and playback


I am starting to seriously consider a computer-based playback solution. I just got a Sonos music system, and while I am enjoying streaming internet radio through my system, I am also intrigued by the prospect of ripping my music to a storage drive and then using the Sonos to access it wirelessly.

However, I have a rather large issue to confront before I begin ripping my mountain of CDs. I have a large number of club/dance albums that are gapless (i.e., the music flows seamlessly between tracks). When I've tried ripping these CDs in the past, I've never been able to have the tracks remain gapless during playback.

The primary solution that seems to be advanced for this problem is to rip the entire CD as a single file; with only one track, there can't be any track gaps. However, the vast majority of my CDs have a number of songs that I often skip past, and having a single file would make skipping these passages a maddening affair.

How would I go about ripping a gapless CD so that it remains gapless upon playback, and still gives me the option of skipping past the bothersome tracks in the middle that I don't want to hear?

Further details:
I have computers running Windows 7 and XP at the moment. I am willing to rip in either WAV or FLAC. All music would be stored on an external hard drive.

Thank you.
mistercrash

Showing 1 response by mistercrash

So it seems as though gapless ripping isn't really a problem, but gapless playback may be a problem depending on the software that is used.