On gapless tracks

Some albums are mixed with no gap between songs. The end of one track flows directly into the next, often with a held note or a sustained chord. On the album, this is one of the great pleasures of long-form listening. On a streaming service, it usually breaks.

Spotify will sometimes play gapless if you tell it to, and sometimes won't, depending on the device and the source files. When it doesn't, a track that ended on a held chord gets cut off, and the next track starts a beat too late. The album sounds slightly broken in a way the original never did.

For the rooms here this matters mostly in one direction. The sleep room and the wellness room both want long-form listening with no interruption; a small gap between two slow tracks can be enough to wake you from the slip-into-it state the music was trying to build. So where I can, the tracks chosen are ones that work standalone — that don't require a gapless transition to feel finished.

There's a kind of music — long-form ambient, sustained classical — that really only works as an album. Those tracks aren't here, generally. Not because they aren't good, but because the playlist breaks them. The right place to hear those is the album itself, in order, with the room dimmed.