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How To Set Gapless Playback in iTunes

Posted on by Rusty

UPDATE March 2013: As of iTunes 11, the Gapless Album setting has been removed. That doesn’t mean that support for gapless playback has disappeared though. According to this helpful iLounge article, gapless playback is now supported by default and automatically, so there’s no need for a separate feature. Early versions of iTunes still have the setting described below.

Most albums have short sections of silence between songs. But not all of them do — some albums are designed to have one track flow directly into the next; that silence actually disrupts the way the music is supposed to sound. This is especially true of live albums, concert bootlegs, and classical music CDs.

To address this need for what is called “gapless playback,” Apple added a feature to iTunes 7. You can now set an album to not have any gaps of silence before or after it, ensuring that the music is heard as it was intended.

Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: 1-2 minutes

Here’s How:

  1. The first step in setting gapless playback is to find the album you want and select all the tracks on it. Do this by navigating through your iTunes library, finding the album you want to edit, and then selecting all songs on it (do this by clicking one song on the album and then going to the Edit menu and choosing Select All).
  2. Now, use the Get Info command to open a window with the settings for the album. You can do this by going to File -> Get Info or by using the keyboard:On a Mac -> Apple key + I
    On Windows -> Control + I
  3. Look to the bottom right of the pop-up window. You’ll see an option labeled “Gapless Album.” Click the checkbox next to it and select “Yes.”
  4. Click “OK.” Now, when this album plays back as a whole, it will play without the bits of silence between tracks, improving the experience of listening to it.
  5. NOTE: Gapless playback is not supported by all iPods. See the list of iPods that support gapless playback.
Rusty