[RainDawg]

rob (is that your name?),
Thank you for writing out your experiences, which really does mirror mine. EAC (or any other 'simple' wave processing technique) is ismply not effective at removing gaps. Sometimes the gap is not at the end of the track, sometimes it spans over from the end of one into the beginning of the other. Sometimes, there is a large click of diginoise that surfaces somewhere in the middle of the gap. EAC, of course, will see this as the end of the gap, when in truth the gap AND the click should be deleted.

The only way to remove gaps or clicks between tracks smoothly and without leaving a trace behind is by combining all of the tracks into one long wav file, and processing it from there. I personally use Cool Edit for this, and the "Open Append" and autosmoothing functions work nicely. You open all of the wavs into one long file, zoom in on the silence, manually select it, and delete. The autosmoothing feature will blend the two portions that have been joined together nicely, and the audio will flow perfectly.

You CAN do this with freeware, but it's quite a bit more difficult. Join the tracks (shntool is the best for this, but make sure you save the cue data first so that you know where the track splits are), then manually delete and use the pencil tool to smooth the joined sections.

Just don't expect a simple "remove gaps" feature on any software, even one as great as EAC, to be able to work perfectly. If you're going to edit audio and share it with others, do it right and spend the time to make it perfect.