[Mp4-tech] automatic tagging and gapless playback for MP4 files

[Hans-Juergen Bardenhagen]

The foobar2000 plugin and tag.exe developer Case has created a new  
output plugin for FAAC called foo_faac.dll that enables tagging MP4  
files while encoding/transcoding from any input format that foobar2000  
can decode. That way existing tags (ID3 or APE) from the input files  
won't get lost anymore, because they are directly transformed to iPod/ 
iTunes4 compatible tags. If you send the resulting MP4/M4A files to your  
Apple portable with e.g. EphPod 2.71 or Sveta Portable Audio, the iPod  
database will be updated with these tags, and the display will show  
them. If your input files don't have any tags yet, you can easily tag  
them with foobar's masstagger (based on tag.exe) first, e.g. with the  
option "guess values from file name". This is also possible for WAV  
files and APEv2 tags now. Tagging the MP4 files afterwards works fine,  
too, e.g. if you used an appropriate file naming scheme while creating  
the input files.
Furthermore foo_faac is the first AAC/MP4 application that allows
gapless playback in combination with foo_mp4.dll (the input plugin)
which hasn't been available for this compression format yet. This
feature will probably be implemented in the Winamp 2.9x input plugin and
the command line version of FAAC soon, so you can listen to live albums
or classical music without any pauses between the individual tracks now.
To test these new features you will need at least foobar2000 v0.7 beta
29 and foo_faac v0.2.2 as well as an updated foo_mp4.dll (all included
in the "Special Installer" of the latest foobar version). You can
download it from here:
http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/html/foobar0.7.html
You can find the configuration of foo_faac in the diskwriter folder  
(click on the "Preferences" menu, then "FAAC encoder") or by right- 
clicking any audio file ("Convert", then "Settings...") that you have to  
add to the playlist of foobar2000 first.