UPDATE - 4/19/07 - The below method just doesn’t work for me. I blogged (i.e: farted) this out in a bit of excitement thinking I had found the solution to this problem. Only problem is, it’s been over a week of me playing occasionally trying to make this work for me and it won’t. However, I’ve seen a number of people on the intraweb writing in comments that it HAS worked for them, so I’ll keep it here for you lucky bastards that it works for.

This is an old complaint, but I had to read some infuriating posts on a macintosh forum and then scroll to the bottom of comments of a better informed community somewhere else and scroll to the very bottom of the comments in order to find this fix. With this in mind, here’s a post for the intraweb gods on how to disable gapless playback in itunes.

Despite what a ton of apple fans with their heads up their ass think, gapless playback, and it’s automatic implementation, is a huge pain in the ass for power mp3 collectors like myself. Combined with the awful library update features of Itunes and you have features that make this program nearly unusable.

Ok, here’s the workaround.

* When Itunes starts and loads up your library for the first time (if you are reloading it like me), click the X for both Determining Album Art AND Determining Gapless playback. (Album art is a whole other headache in iTunes I’m not even touching here)

* Now select all your tracks (Ctrl+A)

* Right click for “Get Info” and CHECK the box for “Gapless Album” and make sure “NO” is selected.

* Click Apply.

That’s it, no more horrid gapless playback checking when you run Itunes.

In theory, but it’s never FUCKING WORKED FOR ME. iTunes keeps coming up trying to determine gapless playback for my gazillion songs. And every time I need to reload my library, it begins. Again. My love/hate relationship with iTunes continues.

While we’re at it, here’s 2 essential iTunes mods:

Multi-Plugin - The biggest treat of Multi-Plugin is the ability to add custom skins to iTunes to get rid of it’s rather boring look. However, the features don’t end there; once Multi-Plugin is installed you will see a tab called “Multi-Plugin” within preferences, which adds a lot of custom options you will wonder why Apple never included in iTunes in the first place.

iTunes Library Updater - Anyone with a large and growing mp3 collection has banged their head up against the wall with how the iTunes music library behaves. This small and incredibly helpful program will allow you to easily and quickly update your iTunes library when it changes.

The whole fact I had to struggle with this crap today has reminded me that I have to bend over backwards to get a software music player working the way I like it to. Here’s the 3 I’m using right now and why, though I’m always on the lookout for good alternative suggestions, as I’m not quite happy with any of them.

#1 - iTunes. Why? The interface. There’s something really clean and easy about the iTunes interface that has kept me hooked despite all it’s problems. There’s no question, iTunes is designed, like AOL, to trap you in their universe, only buying tunes from their music store, only ripping through their interface, and never being able to smoothly switch players. The way they limit features and function to accomplish this borders on an evil comparable only to Microsoft. But damn! I like that interface!

#2 - 1by1. 1by1 is the literal opposite of iTunes. It’s unpopular, small, very easy on your computer resources, ridiculously fast, and just as ridiculously ugly. If you, like me, already have all your music saved in a folder format of artist–>album, this player rawks as a way to quickly and easily play your favorite albums. In fact, this small little proggie would take over iTunes as my favorite if not for the fact that it doesn’t play mpeg 4 (that’s those m4a music files all your friends with iTunes have forced on you).

#3 - Winamp. I still have winamp out of nostalgia, but it’s attempts to compete with iTunes as a media library solution have pretty much failed for me. The interface is awful. Just awful, for me it’s unusable. However, I still occasionally use Winamp the way I have since they started: I open up the playlist window, toss in a bunch of folders based on my mood, shuffle, and save the playlist to open another day. Thanks to this, I still haven’t removed from my computer.