[Trygve]

I have a QuickTime movie (audio only) that consists of a few dozen tracks of MP3 data. They are aligned such that at most only two tracks are playing simultaneously as there is a constant music track and many small speach tracks.

It plays fine in QuickTime Player and in iTunes, but when downloaded to the iPod it stutters. All the MP3 embedded data is at the same bitrate and stereo settings.

Is there anyway to get the iPod to play this data correctly without having to first convert the whole thing to a single MP3 track?

[Dork.]

Nope, iPods don't seem to like gapless playback from one track to another. Drives me up the wall, personally.

We talked about it some in this thread. Someone presented a method to put audiobook bookmarks into a single MP3 file so that you could at least go from sub-track to sub-track within the MP3 file, but I haven't tried it out yet.

Oh, wait -- you have two tracks playing at the same time. That's a little different, as the iPod probably only has enough horsepower to play back one MP3 stream at a time. All the heavy lifting for the audio and video is done by dedicated hardware chips, and I imagine they didn't account for decoding more than one audio stream.

[Trygve]

Keep in mind these are all tracks within one file. ie a QuickTime movei file with multiple overlapping sound tracks.

[Dork.]

Originally Posted by Trygve

Keep in mind these are all tracks within one file. ie a QuickTime movei file with multiple overlapping sound tracks.

I'm not sure if it matters. IIRC, QuickTime is only a "container" format, which incorporates media files inside it. The hardware will still have to decode the individual MP3 files one at a time, and probably does not have enough horsepower to decode two stereo audio files at once. But this is stretching the limit of my knowledge, and perhaps someone else has more of a clue.