HELP NEEDED: looking for a concert / live CD image with inter-track speech / noise

[Menneisyys]

UPDATE (the same day, 10:17 PM CET): fortunately, in the meantime, I've found out that one of my Finnish language audio books (Jerry Cotton G-mies, Snapcd - 635abc, Poptori) has no pauses between tracks. That is, it provides excellent material for the tests. I would still send a big thank you for Dotan Cohen at AximSite for his help by pointing me towards Pink Floyd CD's.

All in all, just ignore this thread - I've solved the problem in the meantime (yeah, I wouldn't have thought an audio book triple CD I've had for years would be the solution, and not a concert recording ).


As many of you already know, I’m working on a soon-to-be-published Multimedia (MM) Bible with special attention to crossfading / gapless playing. I also plan to test different desktop-based encoder tools to see which of them allow for eliminating the additional silence inevitably introduced by the encoding process; that is, which of them includes meta-information in the encoded file, what MM players are able to correctly handle this and so on.

I’ve checked out all my CD’s but didn’t find any of them that would be OK for such a test. I need a CD (mostly live concert CD’s belong to this category; unfortunately, the “live” CD’s I have are mostly classical music and don’t contain any inter-track stuff) that HAS some stuff between two tracks. All this in order to find out the ability of Windows Mobile multimedia players to correctly play back everything, not losing a bit of info and not introducing any additional pause between tracks.

PLEASE NOTE that

1. I’m not trying to pirate stuff (if I wanted to just pirate some MP3’s, I could just look around on P2P networks and get everything I want without telling anyone). Also, it’s only me that will have access to the image, not anyone else – that is, you won’t be involved in any kind of piracy either. Finally, you’ll get the proper credits in the article (“Thanks for XY for providing me a CD image for gapless playback testing”), as with all my other articles.
2. I’d need even partial (!) CD images, NOT MP3 rips or any kind of a rip (because any of such stuff would make it impossible for me to actually check encoding). If you can, in some way, only extract a partial CD image, which only contains, say, two short songs with some speech / something happening in between, it’d only take up some 20-50 Mbytes to transfer – not the 400-600 Mbyte a standard CD image takes up.
3. If you do know of such a CD but can’t create a CD image for me, just tell me the title of the CD. Even that would be of help; that way, I’d avoid wasting hours of listening to CD’s to find one with inter-track stuff in the local CD shop because I could ask for the CD right away. Of course, I’d still prefer a CD image to avoid having to find the CD. (Remember, I’m not American – it’s far more complicated to get stuff like CD’s, particularly rare ones, here in Europe. If I can get it at all – via, say, amazon.de if it’s not in the local shops -, it’ll take several days.)
4. Any kind of CD, any language, any music / speech type would do - as long as it HAS in-track say, ambient music or speech.

[Menneisyys]

UPDATE (the same day, 10:17 PM CET): fortunately, in the meantime, I've found out that one of my Finnish language audio books (Jerry Cotton G-mies, Snapcd - 635abc, Poptori) has no pauses between tracks. That is, it provides excellent material for the tests. I would still send a big thank you for Dotan Cohen at AximSite for his help by pointing me towards Pink Floyd CD's.

All in all, just ignore this thread - I've solved the problem in the meantime (yeah, I wouldn't have thought an audio book triple CD I've had for years would be the solution, and not a concert recording ).


As many of you already know, I’m working on a soon-to-be-published Multimedia (MM) Bible with special attention to crossfading / gapless playing. I also plan to test different desktop-based encoder tools to see which of them allow for eliminating the additional silence inevitably introduced by the encoding process; that is, which of them includes meta-information in the encoded file, what MM players are able to correctly handle this and so on.

I’ve checked out all my CD’s but didn’t find any of them that would be OK for such a test. I need a CD (mostly live concert CD’s belong to this category; unfortunately, the “live” CD’s I have are mostly classical music and don’t contain any inter-track stuff) that HAS some stuff between two tracks. All this in order to find out the ability of Windows Mobile multimedia players to correctly play back everything, not losing a bit of info and not introducing any additional pause between tracks.

PLEASE NOTE that

1. I’m not trying to pirate stuff (if I wanted to just pirate some MP3’s, I could just look around on P2P networks and get everything I want without telling anyone). Also, it’s only me that will have access to the image, not anyone else – that is, you won’t be involved in any kind of piracy either. Finally, you’ll get the proper credits in the article (“Thanks for XY for providing me a CD image for gapless playback testing”), as with all my other articles.
2. I’d need even partial (!) CD images, NOT MP3 rips or any kind of a rip (because any of such stuff would make it impossible for me to actually check encoding). If you can, in some way, only extract a partial CD image, which only contains, say, two short songs with some speech / something happening in between, it’d only take up some 20-50 Mbytes to transfer – not the 400-600 Mbyte a standard CD image takes up.
3. If you do know of such a CD but can’t create a CD image for me, just tell me the title of the CD. Even that would be of help; that way, I’d avoid wasting hours of listening to CD’s to find one with inter-track stuff in the local CD shop because I could ask for the CD right away. Of course, I’d still prefer a CD image to avoid having to find the CD. (Remember, I’m not American – it’s far more complicated to get stuff like CD’s, particularly rare ones, here in Europe. If I can get it at all – via, say, amazon.de if it’s not in the local shops -, it’ll take several days.)
4. Any kind of CD, any language, any music / speech type would do - as long as it HAS in-track say, ambient music or speech.

[Menneisyys]

EDIT (21:42CET, the same day): thanks to AximSite forum member Dotan Cohen, my attention was driven to Pink Floyd CD's. I'm pretty sure even local CD shops have these CD's. I let you know if I don't have any luck, which is highly improbable; in the meantime, I don't need any CD images (of course, you can still go on telling me exactly what CD's could be used for such testing).