File this under: “Things I should have figured out in 1997.” Today I was listening to The Police – Zenyatta Mondatta very loudly. Between track 2 and 3 there was a dramatic gap that I could fit a truck into. Out of nowhere this made me think: It’s 2010 and I can’t listen to an album in mp3 without half second gaps? I know I tried to solve this problem once in Winamp and probably just gave up on it. Probably because it’s not THAT big of a deal, I missed the right buttons to get it working, or I should have stopped using Winamp 5 years ago. 😐
Well, I still use good’ole Winamp 5.0.5. Why? Because it plays MP3’s. It’s not a: download manager, media database, video player, encoder, weather bug, malware, virus, and it uses 1 process on my PC – not 5 and 3 applications plus 2 services that stay resident in memory should I decide to plug in my portable music player. /rant When it installs by default the gap-less play is not enabled. No time like 13 years later to fix something.
Fix this by going to Preferences (Ctrl + P) / Output / DirectSound / Configure
Set buffer ahead on track change to something more then ZERO. Five hundred worked for me.
Check ‘remove silence at the beginning – end of track’.
Brilliant. Thank you, this solved the problem of gapless playback on Winamp for me. The the next trick would be effective cross-fading without a plugin.
Found this 5 years later! Worked beautifully! Thank you!