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Topic: Help me understand qaac --no-smart-padding (Read 3769 times) previous topic - next topic
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Help me understand qaac --no-smart-padding

So I just read all I could find on the Web about the --no-smart-padding command line option of qaac and I'm still lost.

While I understand that if I want the same results as iTunes, I need to add --no-smart-padding, why would I want the same results as iTunes? qaac docs discourage us to use --no-smart-padding what's best?

What are the pros and cons of using --no-smart-padding (in layman terms, I'm not an audiophile that knows all the jargon)?

Re: Help me understand qaac --no-smart-padding

Reply #1
Smart padding is a way to "smooth" the transition between tracks.  Gapless playback enables the end of one track and the start of the next to be played without a time interval between them, but there may still be audible artefacts.  Lossy encoding depends on the audio before and after a particular sample, but the "after" is missing at the end of a track and the "before" is missing at the start of the next track, so the audio might not transition smoothly.  This problem can be mitigated in various ways; smart padding smooths the audio at the start and end of tracks to reduce artefacts due to the abrupt end of the audio.  The "padding" is encoded as real audio, but trimmed at playback.

For obvious reasons, smart padding is recommended but so far as I know it is not used by iTunes, perhaps in case there are decoders that don't understand it.  Hence your question.

Re: Help me understand qaac --no-smart-padding

Reply #2
I used iTunes previously to create my aac files and my iPod would get hung up transitioning from one track to the next on some CD's.  Most, but not all, of the time this happened on DJ mixes where there were lots of tracks and it would transition from one track to the next pretty quickly (short/edited track lengths).

Using smart padding with qaac fixed this.
JXL