Gapless playback won't be available until VLC 4. Audio getting cut off at the end has been a known issue for 10 years, and will apparently be fixed in v4, as well. I realize that I could be running the nightly to fix the audio issue, but then I'm just trading for other existing v4 bugs -- and these fixes were only implemented very recently into the nightly, so for me at least, VLC has still been a very subpar audio player.

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/25181

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/549