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i-GENERATION
So I managed to get a "preview" off the intarwebs for the new Motion City Soundtrack CD. Very good. I found a higher quality preview and got that as well. Now that I've dumped it on my ipod it seems that it cuts out the last few seconds of each song. I've manage to track down the problem, so I thought I'd share it:
"This is a somewhat known problem, and seems to be a result of the gapless playback analysis that occurs when you import the tracks into iTunes the first time.
Basically, the iTunes database is storing an end-of-track marker and passing it to the iPod in order to properly support gapless playback for those albums that require it (although all such tracks are tagged in this manner).
However, this marker is based on an absolute byte position in the file. Of course, since a 192kbps file is 50% larger than a 128kbps file, when you replace the underlying files, the iTunes marker still points to the same physical end-of-file position, which will now be about 2/3rds of the way through the track, rather than at the actual end.
Likewise, if you were to convert your files to a lower bit-rate and then replace the underlying files, you'd actually lose gapless playback entirely (since the marker would now be well past the actual end of the file).
The bottom line is that replacing underlying tracks is not supported by iTunes, and technically never has been something that you're supposed to do. With the gapless playback analysis, however, this becomes all the more obvious.
Unfortunately, the only way around it is to either re-rip the CDs through iTunes itself (it will offer to replace the tracks for you in the process, and reperform the necessary gapless analysis), or delete your existing tracks from your library and import the newly-ripped tracks as new entries, which will unfortunately result in losing your ratings, playcounts and playlist references for those tracks."
Oh, and I stole that awesome explanation from some forum...
