Welcome to a new dawn in the science of music ripping. It always bugged me how MP3s add a slight split-second of silence to the beginning of every audio file, adding unwanted gaps between songs, interrupting segues or crossfades, breaking up the flow of live albums. Apple has recently released a crude Terminal-based app called ChapterTool which I’ve found handy in getting around this problem. It’s intended to be used to create enhanced podcasts, to add access points in longer recordings with which to create chapters; which in turn allows one to add artwork or a URL to each cue point. For instance, if someone does a podcast on music, he or she can include different cover art for each album mentioned plus links to the artists’ websites — as Apple itself does with its New Music Tuesday podcasts. What I like best about it is that it can be used to rip entire albums to my iPod, keeping them intact as single files, but with chapter markings which still allow access to each song. I’m having great fun re-ripping a lot of live and concept albums (anything where the sound is pretty much uninterrupted) and, finally, be able to retain and present the music with gapless playback.ChapterTool can be difficult to use, since one is forced to type up one’s own XML code (not to mention the general unfamiliarity of working with Terminal); but there are a few alternatives. These are best illustrated in the ChapterTool tutorial at Vox Media. They also provide links to alternatives such as the free ChapterToolMe app (which I had problems with) and the Podcaster Enhancer Applescript (which did a good job of walking me through each step of the process, but which might get confusing with larger projects). These work as front-ends, since a free download of ChapterTool is still required. The one I like best is the newly released Vizacast, which costs $25. Its layout is simple and so far it’s produced the best results. It’s got a couple bugs (although a “Set Start Time” button enters cue times, it’s quite difficult to edit these times manually: typing in 11:36 winds up as anything from 00:01:36 to 01:01:36; and it can’t handle international characters or Apple Lossless files, though these might be underlying limitations of ChapterTool itself) but it at least gets the job done quickly and easily. At last I can hear tracks from Klaus Badelt’s Pirates of the Caribbean, Delerium’s Odyssey, Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, Alabama 3’s Exile on Coldharbour Lane, Mark Snow’s The Truth and the Light (to name a recent few) as they were intended, without gaps.
