Subsonic Forum

by **lucidwings** » Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:06 am

+1 yep

by **donjulien** » Thu Feb 24, 2011 11:53 pm

+1 on gapless, which I guess means:

by **donjulien** » Tue Mar 01, 2011 2:25 am

@smallfish: As far as I know, gapless doesn't need 2 players. As you put it, it's all about buffering the next song just after the current one, but it all happens in the same buffer of the only player. The trick is that the mp3 format originally wasn't designed for gapless, and each frame has a fixed size, even though it is padded with silence at the end. Hence, the buffer must be designed to drop all the silence at the end of a track. Other formats do not suffer from this.

by **tylerhauser** » Fri Mar 11, 2011 5:59 am

+1 for Gapless Playback!

by **utopian** » Fri Mar 11, 2011 3:05 pm

and me

by **3R3** » Fri Mar 11, 2011 9:16 pm

+1 for gapless. It'š probably easier to implement this on the mobile platforms (the apps) since they dont use flash (or so I guess). Yes gapless would be mighty fine, I'd love it!

by **nelgin** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 10:44 pm

I'll +1 for gapless. A lot of live albums and concept albums require gapless to really sound good.

That said, sometimes I don't want to jump from a quiet to a loud song abruptly. I'd like to being up crossfading as well. So consider 3 default options

1) normal gap
2) gapless
3) crossfade

Add the ability to tag a song or album as gapless, normal or crossfade. That was you can tag the entire "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" as gapless, yet you can have your other stuff default to crossfade.

Crossfade can be implemented by examining the last, say 5, seconds of a song. If it ends abruptly, no crossfade out, if it fades out, you can fade in the next song. It'll take a bit of working at in beta to get it right, but that right there would make this a killer product worth paying for.

by **matka** » Thu Apr 07, 2011 6:33 pm

donjulien wrote:@smallfish: As far as I know, gapless doesn't need 2 players. As you put it, it's all about buffering the next song just after the current one, but it all happens in the same buffer of the only player. The trick is that the mp3 format originally wasn't designed for gapless, and each frame has a fixed size, even though it is padded with silence at the end. Hence, the buffer must be designed to drop all the silence at the end of a track. Other formats do not suffer from this.

ogg supports (or as you say was designed for) gapless. Can gapless ogg be implemented ?

by **flandroid** » Sat Apr 16, 2011 7:25 pm

I'd donate again for gapless playback.

by **rschauer** » Sun Apr 17, 2011 2:57 pm

+1

And I have to comment...I am absolutely thrilled to see no one arguing about this here so far. Everywhere else that I've seen people requesting/discussing gapless playback (I looked for a long time for a gapless Android app), there have to be a bunch of jerks who don't get it (e.g. "why in the world would you want that," "it's not that big of a deal, just live with it," to quote some of the nicer ones) and don't contribute anything meaningful to the discussion. It's refreshing to find a thread on this particular topic in a place (other than audiophile forums) where people understand it, or at least don't throw a meaningless fit when someone asks for it. Bravo to this community; you've all just made my day.

by **achoo5000** » Sun Apr 17, 2011 5:57 pm

rschauer wrote:+1

And I have to comment...I am absolutely thrilled to see no one arguing about this here so far. Everywhere else that I've seen people requesting/discussing gapless playback (I looked for a long time for a gapless Android app), there have to be a bunch of jerks who don't get it (e.g. "why in the world would you want that," "it's not that big of a deal, just live with it," to quote some of the nicer ones) and don't contribute anything meaningful to the discussion. It's refreshing to find a thread on this particular topic in a place (other than audiophile forums) where people understand it, or at least don't throw a meaningless fit when someone asks for it. Bravo to this community; you've all just made my day.

A thread without meaningless fits? Why do you want that? Just live with it.

by **rschauer** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 1:45 am

achoo5000 wrote:A thread without meaningless fits? Why do you want that? Just live with it.

by **WildWalker** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 9:04 am

I asked for this months ago,

Good luck with your request though.

The issue I considered is how the player knows to use gapless mode or not? Maybe the audio would require an extra ID3 tag for gapless mode?

by **rschauer** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 12:34 pm

WildWalker wrote:The issue I considered is how the player knows to use gapless mode or not? Maybe the audio would require an extra ID3 tag for gapless mode?

Short answer: for MP3, yes; for others such as OGG or FLAC, no.

As for whether or not to use gapless "mode," the answer is that it should not be a mode, it should be considered the correct behavior, at least when listening to a full album. If you want a gap between your songs for some reason, that should be the option to turn on or off.

Long answer:

As you may or may not be aware, the issue stems from the fact that "lossy" compression such as MP3 and OGG introduce padding at the end of the file. As far as gapless playback is concerned, the difference is that some codecs (OGG and Musepak, for example) support it natively and some (MP3) don't; in the case of MP3, addons such as LAME's Info tag work around this issue. Lossless codecs (FLAC) do not introduce such padding and don't require additional support.

Now, if, for example, your music files are FLAC or OGG and you're not transcoding with Subsonic, then it's a simple matter of buffering the next track (so you don't have the loading delay) and making certain the player itself does not introduce a gap. If your files are MP3 and/or you are transcoding to MP3, then you have two concerns: 1, the player needs to support the appropriate tag (again, this is not native to the format, so universal support is difficult at best), and 2, your files need to have the required information in that tag.

What some often suggest to correct this is to use crossfading, or an algorithm that strips silence from the ends of tracks. While these can sometimes help minimize the issue, neither is really a solution as they are both "best-guess" oriented. The latter is particularly annoying at times, as it can't differentiate between padding and intentional silence.

Hope this clears things up.

by **WildWalker** » Tue Apr 19, 2011 7:26 am

It would be nice if Sindre could make a comment on this thread, has anyone seen him around lately?

Subsonic Forum

Gapless Playback

Who is online