Vinyl Rereleases December 2016 (Broken, TDS, TF)

[botley]

Does playback software notice these blanks and drop them out of the buffer, like they now treat MP3s (if the software supports gapless playback)? Or are these blanks actually occurring on playback and they're just so fast nobody notices?

The latter. I believe this is an "if you can't beat them, (dis-)join them" effort to counteract imperfect implementation of gapless playback. By having the tracks intentionally drop to silence, but so briefly you don't notice, there is no 'click' when seamlessly-segued tracks are interrupted by playback software (which is actually far more distracting).