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Help Gapless playback

Yikes. Much of this discussion has been terribly misinformed. People have commented on what things work and what do not, but no one seems to have understood that there are too many intersecting issues to make a broad statement about particular players being gapless.

Here's the real deal: MP3s were never designed for gapless playback. This is because an MP3 file's length must always be a multiple of a certain fixed chunk of time. If the song's length isn't miraculously some multiple of that time, the file will be padded with zeros and there will be a period of silence at the end of the song... the mathematical remainder, if you will. Each song will randomly have a different amount of gap at the end.

At some point, a meta tag option was introduced into the LAME MP3 encoder, so a compatible player could later know the exact song length, and not play the padded silence. This means that both the MP3 file and the player need to be gapless-ready, or it's not going to happen.

So, to say any one player can definitively play MP3s gaplessly is not valid, since it also depends on how any particular MP3 was encoded. Also, some MP3s will luckily have such a small amount of padding, you might think that the player is somehow gapless, but won't be with most other songs.
 
markerb said:
Yikes. Much of this discussion has been terribly misinformed. People have commented on what things work and what do not, but no one seems to have understood that there are too many intersecting issues to make a broad statement about particular players being gapless.

Here's the real deal: MP3s were never designed for gapless playback. This is because an MP3 file's length must always be a multiple of a certain fixed chunk of time. If the song's length isn't miraculously some multiple of that time, the file will be padded with zeros and there will be a period of silence at the end of the song... the mathematical remainder, if you will. Each song will randomly have a different amount of gap at the end.

At some point, a meta tag option was introduced into the LAME MP3 encoder, so a compatible player could later know the exact song length, and not play the padded silence. This means that both the MP3 file and the player need to be gapless-ready, or it's not going to happen.

So, to say any one player can definitively play MP3s gaplessly is not valid, since it also depends on how any particular MP3 was encoded. Also, some MP3s will luckily have such a small amount of padding, you might think that the player is somehow gapless, but won't be with most other songs.
Click to expand...

I really don't know the technical details of gapless but my understanding is the player reads ahead and strips out the the padded zeros. I listen to a lot of live music, Furthur & The Grateful Dead. When playing on the iPhone the there never seemed to be a gap. Whether is is really gapless or not, I don't know. Now on Android, I got really good result with PowerAmp.I am probably one of those misimformed. Frankly, I don't care as long as I don't hear a gap in my live music.
 
rammsky said:
Hi, this reply might not be useful, but its just my opinion.

I'd prefer my music playback to have that momentary pause to catch a breather between different songs. And I think majority agrees with me.

Thus, since apps are built for the majority of users, this explains the lack of gapless music playback apps.
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Rammsky got some disagreement with the above remark and then:

markerb said:
Yikes. Much of this discussion has been terribly misinformed. People have commented on what things work and what do not, but no one seems to have understood that there are too many intersecting issues to make a broad statement about particular players being gapless.

Here's the real deal: MP3s were never designed for gapless playback. This is because an MP3 file's length must always be a multiple of a certain fixed chunk of time. If the song's length isn't miraculously some multiple of that time, the file will be padded with zeros and there will be a period of silence at the end of the song... the mathematical remainder, if you will. Each song will randomly have a different amount of gap at the end.

At some point, a meta tag option was introduced into the LAME MP3 encoder, so a compatible player could later know the exact song length, and not play the padded silence. This means that both the MP3 file and the player need to be gapless-ready, or it's not going to happen.

So, to say any one player can definitively play MP3s gaplessly is not valid, since it also depends on how any particular MP3 was encoded. Also, some MP3s will luckily have such a small amount of padding, you might think that the player is somehow gapless, but won't be with most other songs.
Click to expand...

and finally:

marcfogel said:
I really don't know the technical details of gapless but my understanding is the player reads ahead and strips out the the padded zeros. I listen to a lot of live music, Furthur & The Grateful Dead. When playing on the iPhone the there never seemed to be a gap. Whether is is really gapless or not, I don't know. Now on Android, I got really good result with PowerAmp.I am probably one of those misimformed. Frankly, I don't care as long as I don't hear a gap in my live music.
Click to expand...

I think this explains Rammsky's remark. What I mean by gapless playback and what I suspect most people mean is that the amount of silence between tracks should be exactly what was intended for the album the track was taken from. If that was a CD then the amount of silence should be that which was put in when the CD was mastered. For some CDs there will be some silence between tracks and for others there will be none. In the former category a classical CD with more than one complete work (e.g. symphony) on the same CD will often leave a longer gap between works than between movements to give the listener the chance to turn off after one work. The latter category would be true of mixes, soundtracks, live recordings etc.

If a player implements gapless by detecting all trailing silence at the end of a track and not playing it then this may indeed disturb the listening experience for albums that were intended to have gaps. The correct way is for the encoding process to record the exact length of the original recording - accurate to the sample not just to the number of encoded blocks. All the popular audio codecs divide the original recording into blocks for processing - some such as OGG Vorbis have always recorded the exact length as part of the standard whereas for MP3 it was added later to the ID3 tags and there are some encoders and some players that don't support it.

This does not excuse not supporting it in the stock player.
 
Hi, great forum! I've checked out several players on Android. For gapless playback

-GoneMad
-Poweramp

work on my device (sony ericson xperia neo)

Both of these players perform well on many levels.
 
I have recently had this problem (mainly listening to a ton of Pink Floyd stuff), and I found that JukeFox works great. It requires a little bit of configuration on your part. But it works!
 
Deathsbreed said:
I have recently had this problem (mainly listening to a ton of Pink Floyd stuff), and I found that JukeFox works great. It requires a little bit of configuration on your part. But it works!
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the only way I know how to get gapless (With album art) as good as itunes is in winamp and rip as m4a. problem comes when you add art. so rip as flac add album art to file then in playlist send to m4a in format converter, works for me as I save to flac anyhow.
 
Cyberkitten71 said:
Hi all,
Google Play Music running on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) or higher is ok and includes gapless playback.

hope this helps

Noemi
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No it doesn't by a longshot pisses me off I have tons of phish Grateful dead etc... Live albums and the stupid silence in between tracks is finger nails on a chalkboard seriously I love the concept of google play music app but Dam give me option in settings to click gapless or hell crossfade in the the least jezzzz
 
I know this thread is pretty much dead but I really have to recommend DeaDBeeF The only player that works properly on my Nexus 4 (5.0.1) and it claims to be able to do the same with mp3 (gap-less in the sttings)
tried Flac beautiful. Haven't tried any thing else yet (only downloaded 2 hours ago) but out performs every thing else I have tried over the past 2 days
Hope it works for you
Good luck

Hedge
 
FrankTheTank said:
iphone can do this no problem at all. It's OK, by 2015 Android will have caught up....Just wait 5 years it'll all be fine in the end ;-)
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i usually listen to live albums and my iphone 4 does it best compared to my other phone lenovo vibe x2. i've tried using google music and the gaps are still very noticeable. a live album should not have any gaps, they go from one song to the next
 
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