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Gapless playback

Some albums were never meant to have edges. A live set runs continuously, a DJ mix beat-matches straight across the boundaries, and classical movements marked attacca begin the instant the one before them ends.

Gapless playback means those transitions arrive the way the record intended, with no half-second of silence where the applause should be.

Where it matters most

Section titled “Where it matters most”

You will notice gapless on a particular kind of record and never think about it on the rest:

  • Live albums. Crowd noise carries between songs, and a gap chops it into pieces.
  • DJ mixes and continuous sets. The beat runs through the boundary or the mix falls apart.
  • Classical. Movements marked attacca run straight into each other by instruction.
  • Concept albums. Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, anything built as one piece.

On a normal pop record with real silence between tracks, gapless changes nothing you can hear. That silence is in the file, and BitDek plays what is in the file.

How it works

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BitDek queues the next track’s audio into the same playback engine before the current one finishes. The engine never stops between tracks, so there is nothing to restart and no gap to hear.

The alternative is to hand each track to the system as a fresh piece of playback and accept whatever pause that costs. Keeping one engine running across the whole queue is the harder build, and it is what gets the gap to an actual zero rather than a small one.

Nothing to turn on

Section titled “Nothing to turn on”

There is no gapless setting, no per-album option, and no mode to remember. It runs on every album in your library, in every format BitDek supports, from the first time you open the app.

If you hear a gap

Section titled “If you hear a gap”

Bluetooth is the usual explanation. It is a buffered link, so your iPhone encodes the audio and the receiver decodes and buffers it before anything reaches a speaker. BitDek hands the next track over with no gap in it, and what happens to it after that is outside the app. Car stereos are the most common culprit, because some re-sync at every track boundary on the assumption that a new track is a new stream.

The test that settles it: play the same transition over Bluetooth, then again on the phone speaker or through a wired connection. A gap that disappears is the transport rather than the app, and no player on your phone will fix it.

Two other things are worth ruling out. Version 1.2.1 fixed two Bluetooth gapless bugs, so check your version in Settings under About and update if you are behind. And some gaps are written into the files themselves by ripping software that padded each track, which every player then reproduces faithfully. Our guide to ripping CDs to FLAC covers getting that right the first time.

Gapless works on the overwhelming majority of transitions, on every output. If you find one that gaps consistently on a wired connection, tell us. That is a real report and we treat it as one.

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