Gapless music playback

English Multimedia
#1

I brought this issue up in another section about why I was still tied down to Windows and I wondered if I’m just doing something wrong.

I have a large music library consisting entirely of flacs ripped from CD’s and DVD-Audio’s. I have been unable to achieve gapless playback similar to what foobar2000 can do in Windows. As an example: the tracks on “The Dark Side of the Moon” all blend in “gaplessly” with the following track. When listening to them on various players in linux, there is always a perceptible break as the player transitions from one track to the next. This is a known limitation in mplayer, and possibly with the latest version of amarok, but banshee is said to play gaplessly and there is even a check-box in its configuration to enable this. No matter whether I choose xine or gstreamer as the output engine, with or without pulseaudio installed, there is always that perceptible few milliseconds of silence in what should be a seamless playback.

I have tried using foobar2000 in wine and although it plays gaplessly, wine as far as I can tell does not support multichannel playback and the DVD-Audio rips are all either 4.1, 5.0 or 5.1 channels.

So am I missing anything here?

#2

On 04/05/2011 07:06 PM, evetsnameloc wrote:
>
> So am I missing anything here?

use YaST/zypper to down and install vlc…
with the multimedia one click it does video, music and the dishes! :slight_smile:

–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!

#3

Do you mean use vlc as the phonon engine or use the vlc player?

It would be nice to use a player with some kind of library capability, such as banshee or amarok.

#4

since i don’t know what a “phonon engine” is, perhaps i should stop
trying to be helpful…sorry…

but, i will say that lots of folks throw rotten apples at amarok (i have
not, for example installed it in years)…

vlc runs everything i need to watch or listen to using a computer (i
have a B&O for ‘other’ listening)…perhaps you have need of a “phonon
engine” to listen to something other than what i need…sorry.

–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!

#5

I’m sure I used the wrong terminology. Perhaps I should have said “backend” instead of engine. I thought “phonon” was the multimedia support abstraction (quoted from the description in Yast) that KDE uses to interface with the sound system. Then “phonon” uses xine, or gstreamer, or vlc, or possibly others, as the layer which I presume then communicates with ALSA. THis is only what I have gathered on my own. It might well be wrong.

After long googling, I find that gapless playback of music files is a thorn which has been in the side of linux music listeners for years. There might be two separate issues with gapless playback, one being gapless playback of physical CD’s, which might work with some players, and gapless playback of files ripped from CD’s whose tracks merge without a pause into the next track, such as the ones I listed above. It’s admittedly a trivial problem and one which is an issue on a small number of ripped albums. Since it is solvable, however, it would be nice to solve it on linux. If I were smarter I would do it myself.

#6

On Wed, 06 Apr 2011 01:06:01 +0000, evetsnameloc wrote:

> Since it is solvable, however, it would be nice to solve it on linux. If
> I were smarter I would do it myself.

Just join the MP3 files together - problem solved. :slight_smile:

Jim

Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

#7

Music Player Daemon aka mpd. It is a little bit more tricky to set up though.

#8

On 04/06/2011 03:06 AM, evetsnameloc wrote:
>
> I’m sure I used the wrong terminology.
>

i think i need to apologize to you, because over in another thread i
told you that i don’t have any problems with gaps in my music on
linux…it seems i didn’t know what you were talking about…

on my machine when i listen to music there is from the beginning of the
piece to the end of the piece no pauses, gaps, or times when the music
is interrupted, and playback is as recorded and packaged for sale/play,
start to finish…when the individual piece is over, there is (and
always has been (even back on 33 RPM, 45 RPM and 78 RPM vinyl and Edison
tubes) a no sound division between adjoining individual pieces of
music, usually a couple of seconds or so…

i don’t consider that a gap (like a ‘gap’ in bridge means someone goes
for a fall–it is a bad thing) instead the no sound section is there on
purpose…to make one end and the next beginning…DJs use that space
to cue up the next track…

if you don’t want that no sound section to be played, i’d guess that
could be programmed in somehow…but, it would be a new feature, and new
features are asked for in openFATE, here: https://features.opensuse.org/

but be warned that FATE attracts developer attention and programming
time by votes…so if you log a FATE for “gapless” play back be sure and
let the folks here know, so they can vote…

as i don’t see the ‘gaps’ as a problem–i’d rather they spend their
limited development time on other projects…so, i’ll probably not help
your cause…

–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!

#9

Weird …

I’m running banshee, I checked “enable gapless playback” in the preferences screen and started playing “Dark Side Of The Moon” just to check and see if it would go from 1 track to the next, gapless, like on the album version. Much to my surprise it worked just fine … so it’s possible to have gapless playback.

I don’t know what I did to get it working, other than check the box in “preferences”. No gap between track #1, #2, and #3 so far on “Dark Side”. I also tried “Wish You Were Here” and same thing … worked like a charm. Each track is ripped from the CD individually … I don’t have 1 large MP3 file of the entire album.

Looks like you may be using KDE so I don’t know if amarok works this way too, but banshee (GNOME) does what you want it to do.

#10

On Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:06:57 +0000, DenverD wrote:

> on my machine when i listen to music there is from the beginning of the
> piece to the end of the piece no pauses, gaps, or times when the music
> is interrupted, and playback is as recorded and packaged for sale/play,
> start to finish…when the individual piece is over, there is (and
> always has been (even back on 33 RPM, 45 RPM and 78 RPM vinyl and Edison
> tubes) a no sound division between adjoining individual pieces of
> music, usually a couple of seconds or so…

There are some pieces of music, however (Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is an
example, as is the Pink Floyd piece the OP mentioned) where the tracks
are separate (say between the 4th and 5th movement of the B9 mentioned)
but the performance is continuous and a gap interrupts the piece.

Gapless playback is something that (for example) Apple received a lot of
criticism for in the iPod firmware back when my mini was made.
Fortunately, alternative firmware for the iPod mini allows for gapless
playback.

This is something that (as a feature) would need to be implemented as a
part of the buffering algorithm in a specific player - it’s not something
that would be done on the backend, because it’s not about the output to
the sound card, but rather has to do with how individual applications
deal with buffering the next track.

So following on your (DD’s) suggestion here, if the OP opens a feature
request in openFATE, chances are it’ll be pushed upstream to the specific
application that the OP wants to use for gapless playback, as it’s
entirely up to the application to implement this feature, to PulseAudio,
ALSA, OSS, or any other sound system. They just play what the app feeds
them - and if the app feeds a second or two of silence, the sound system
does exactly what it’s told. :slight_smile:

Jim

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator