how to: 3sec pause between mp3 tracks

As I am used to audio cd’s I want to add 3sec pause between each mp3 track of a classical recording. people told me, I must render these pause in the audio file. but I recently bought a classical mp3 album via itunes and they have the pause between the tracks: the track ends, i tunes switches to a kind of pause track and counts reverse -1, 0, 1 and track 2 starts.
thats what I want!

can I do this with wavelab7, logicpro9, protools11?

thx a lot

What is the classical album on iTunes that you’re referring to? If they’ve done this by program or special method, it’s probably a first or very new. If you give the album name, we can look at what it’s doing.

And what are the tracks it’s doing it on. Between all tracks?

Amazon.com Song ID: 215351726

Album: Via Crucis
Interpret: Christina Pluhar/Philippe Jaroussky/Nuria Rial/Barbara Furtuna/L’Arpeggiata

between all tracks
they used Lame3.97
ID3-Tag: v2.3

These just seem like standard MP3 album files with “pause” included in end of file, as on all digital albums AFAIK. What you’re seeing to the right of the playbar in iTunes is a countdown of the entire file (not a switch from count-up to count-down as on CD) and the last 3 seconds of “silence” are just counting down to end of file.

If you open the files in Wavelab or listen in headphones, you can see there is room noise out to the end of file. If you look at the metadata of the file in Wavelab or MP3Tag, there are no markers indicating where to “start” a pause, which would be the only possible way to do this, but would probably be of no use on most players, which is why this is never done as far as I know. The only place I see in Wavelab metadata to add markers is in CART, but that’s not used in MP3 or AAC.

As far as I know, what you have been told is correct: “pause” is added to the end of file, and there is not a “CD like Index 0 Index 1” corollary in the commercial digital file music album world.

I’ve heard of MP3/AAC chapter markers, but that would be a different usage.

Thanks for your answer, Bob. But at my player he really count up and down at some tracks as well the cursor position walks left and right.
Its not at my imported audio cd’s. But on another classical album, bought on itunes (Thomas Adès: Asyla; S. Rattle), II part:

  • its 6min long, 6:00 shows itunes
  • at the end 2sec happens nothing (the counter doesn’t move) but then it goes from 6:00 back to 5:59, then the next track starts!
  • at the same time when the cursor reaches the end of the full-track-timeline, it walks one second to the left, then to the right and the next track starts.

What do you think about that? :question:

I don’t get that here, on Mac iTunes or Windows iTunes so I don’t know what to think. On the left counter in iTunes, the 6:00 track counts up to 5:59 then immediately switches to 0:00 of the next track. (The right counter counts down steadily too). Have you tried a different player like JRiver? Switching to internal or external interface in case that’s interacting? There are no Index 0 pause indicators in these files that I can find anyway (markers or metadata). Maybe you could ask over at hydrogenaudio whether anyone’s ever implemented such a thing for MP3 and AAC. They discuss technical aspects of many file formats.

No, I just have iTunes 12.1.0.5. But there’s a different behavior on my iPod.
To get back to my work: I’ll just add 2-3sec of silence on the end of each track now.

Thank you for this dialogue, Bob, it’s quite interesting stuff.

Bye