Gapless album

A gapless album is a type of album in which some or all of the tracks are intended to be heard seamlessly without any pause. Instead of individual tracks being separated by a brief moment of silence, each transitions directly into the next track without a pause in the sound. Joining tracks this way can be done for a number of reasons, such as splitting a piece's movements into individual tracks, or to help the cohesion of a concept album. Pink Floyd's concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall and The Final Cut, Green Day's American Idiot, Tool's Lateralus, Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and Coldplay's Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends and Mylo Xyloto are famous examples of a gapless album.

While gapless playback was relatively simple to achieve on traditional media formats, an early issue with computer-based formats such as MP3 was the lack of support for gapless playback, causing gapless albums to have short pauses in between each track. Beginning with the iTunes release of Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor, Apple attempted to fix this for their music players by releasing a version of the album where some tracks were merged into a single track to create the effect of gapless playback. Apple adopted gapless playback and gapless album support wholesale with the release of iTunes 7.0 in late 2006, the latter to work with its cross-fade feature. In 2007, Microsoft added gapless album support to its Zune client software.

See also

• Gapless playback, a closely related concept