Looked into it further. Cheers PB, you're right, no easy way around it. Apparently "gapless playback" is still a bit esoteric in the era of folding screen mobile phones with the processing power of a 2 year old desktop #whatever.
Anyone got a good freeware program to merge mp3 files into one audio file?? Batch conversion per folder would be ideal - I've tried foobar which works but requires adding a folder then choosing to convert/merge all files.... I have approx 310 folders of album mixes to merge......