Gapless playback in iTunes.

The new iTunes version that came out today is pretty slick.

There are a bunch of new features in the iTunes Music Store — you can buy movies now, and games, if you have one of those new fangled iPods. There’s also another graphical facelift, because Apple loves to disregard its own HIG.

Whatever. As far as I’m concerned, the best new feature is gapless playback.

One of my long-standing pet peeves about iTunes is the short, quarter-second gap it likes to add between tracks. It’s a minor annoyance, granted — but it’s the kind of minor annoyance that, once noticed, will drive you insane. Albums that rely on continuous sound between tracks — classical works broken up into sections, for example, or the second half of Abbey Road — are especially irritating.

When I started up iTunes 7 for the first time, the status window told me that it was Analyzing Tracks for Gapless Playback, and the program slowly made its way through my 6000-odd tracks. (I sort of wonder what “analysis” it was doing. “Hmm, here’s another track. Should I allow this one to play without gaps? Hey, why not?”) I also asked it to download cover art for everything, which is a neat function, although it missed a bunch of albums.

Anyway, I have Abbey Road on now, and it’s as gapless as a vinyl record. Awesome.