What does "part of a gapless album" really do in itunes?

abcde

So yesterday i was importing all my music into itunes because i reformatted my computer about a week ago, and i was correcting ID3 tag errors here and there, and i noticed the ability to set the songs as "this is part of a gapless album".

I did this thinking all it would do was tell itunes to not pause inbetween songs when playing from that album, which is what i wanted on all my albums (even if they didnt need it). I then right clicked > get info on all the songs and changed them all to "gapless albums: yes" and it actually took about 5 minutes for itunes to go through about all 1500 songs in my library currently. Basically i assumed it edited each song mp3 one by one...

I looked for a song that was supposed to have no gap between it and the next, i played it, and it looks like at the end of it the song now repeats the last 1 or 2 seconds... so what i dont get is what the hell is the point of "this is part of a gapless album". I dont want the last 1 or 2 seconds to loop, i just want there to be no gap inbetween the songs in case the songs continue into one another.

Monoxide

It just plays smoothly into the next one for me, like it's supposed to

edit: some more information at apple support

essentially, in iTunes 7, gapless playback is always on unless you have crossfade turned on

so if you update to iTunes 7 you won't have to worry about it