A gapless album is a type of album in which some or all of the tracks are intended to be heard seamlessly without any pause. Instead of individual tracks being separated by a brief moment of silence, each transitions directly into the next track without a pause in the sound. Joining tracks this way can be done for a number of reasons, such as splitting a piece's movements into individual tracks, or to help the cohesion of a concept album. Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...

's The Wall

The Wall

The Wall is the eleventh studio album by English progressive rock group Pink Floyd. Released as a double album on 30 November 1979, it was subsequently performed live with elaborate theatrical effects, and adapted into a feature film, Pink Floyd—The Wall.As with the band's previous three...

is a famous example of a gapless album.

While gapless playback was relatively simple to achieve on traditional media formats, an early issue with computer-based formats such as MP3 was the lack of support for gapless playback, causing gapless albums to have short pauses in between each track. Beginning with the iTunes

ITunes

iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

 release of Madonna's

Madonna (entertainer)

Madonna is an American singer-songwriter, actress and entrepreneur. Born in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to New York City in 1977 to pursue a career in modern dance. After performing in the music groups Breakfast Club and Emmy, she released her debut album in 1983...

 Confessions on a Dance Floor

Confessions on a Dance Floor

Confessions on a Dance Floor is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Madonna. It was released on November 15, 2005 by Warner Bros. Records. The album was a complete departure from her last studio album, American Life . It included influences of 70s and 80s disco as well as...

, Apple attempted to fix this for their music players by releasing a version of the album where some tracks were merged into a single track to create the effect of gapless playback. Apple adopted gapless playback

Gapless playback

Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks without intervening silence or clicks at the point of the track change. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed...

 and gapless album support wholesale with the release of iTunes 7.0

ITunes version history

The version history of iTunes spans from 2001 to the present and covers the application's evolution and refinement from a simple music player to a control center for many types of media. Support for the iPod and iTunes Store were added in the subsequent versions...

 in late 2006, the latter to work with its cross-fade feature. In 2007, Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 added gapless album support to its Zune

Zune

Zune is a digital media brand owned by Microsoft which includes a line of portable media players, a digital media player software for Windows machines, a music subscription service known as a 'Zune Music Pass', music and video streaming for the Xbox 360 via the Zune Software, music, TV and movie...

client software.