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Help Gapless playback

Hi fellas,

I found a solution for gapless playback on Android. The problem is that the MP3 format isn't the best encoding choice for gapless playback, and many devices cannot play back MP3s without gaps. Since the majority of players for Android use a built-in library for music playback, chances for getting a support for MP3 gapless playback are slim.

However - OGG is a compressed music format which is gapless-friendly. I encoded a few subsequent songs from Abbey Road in OGG format, put them on my Hero (I'm using MixZing, but I'm sure the result would be the same for the default player), and voila - they played back without gaps at all - and no quirks whatsoever during song switching!

Of course, this method isn't perfect - it requires you to encode your files in OGG, and if you have your media library encoded in MP3, and no lossless sources, you will lose some quality when re-encoding to OGG. However, for those of us that store their music in lossless formats like FLAC or WavPack, this solution is great - just encode the music for the phone in OGG instead of MP3.

BTW, I'm pretty sure this will work for many other audio players as well.

Hope this helps people.

Lev.
 
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Ogg is great, but there's no way i'm re-encoding every CD i own again. Also, i dont actually know anywhere that you can buy ogg encoded music from.

The good thing about mp3 is you can guarantee it will play on every device you will own for the forseeable future. Ogg support is still fairly rare, as is FLAC (dont think the hero will play that at all), so i'm not going to buy/rip music in a format which i may not be able to use on my next phone. Unfortunately mp3 is just a really, really crap format when it comes to gapless playback.
 
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In 2007, so its been 3 years - why hasn't other technologies been able to do it? Windows Media player supports it, WinAmp supports it, hell even my 5 year old SqueezeBox supports gapless playback.

Yea definitely. The music experience on stock Android isn't nearly as good as it was with my original iPod Mini in 2004. I've been using bTunes and it makes the experience markedly better, but not having gapless playback is one of the many things that still annoys me.
 
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People were having this trouble with the old iRiver players until rockbox came along.
I remember someone suggested a program that 'listened' for the gaps at the beginning and end of .mp3 files and then removed them. This made less of a gap when playing them back. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of it.

Have a google on the subject as this is not a problem only on android devices but on many devices. Im sure you will be able to find something on it.
If all your mp3 files were ripped the same then they should have the same gap at the beginning and end. It would just be a matter of finding a program that does batch conversions.


As for why people want it, try listening to something like 'The Wall' by Pink Floyd with gaps, really reduces the experience :(

EDIT: As Mr 47 said, .mp3 are not the best for gapless playback, though i hear that LAME encoded mp3s are ok (someone correct me if im wrong). Ogg also should support it
 
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The new version of museek (0.957) in the android market features (optional) gapless playback. Just enable it in the settings and adjust the value of the gap (device dependent). If you encounter any problems visit museek.ethz.ch or send an email to the developers.


Have tried this as well

It works much better than some of the others

No gaps, No pauses. Simples! :D
 
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The new version of museek (0.957) in the android market features (optional) gapless playback. Just enable it in the settings and adjust the value of the gap (device dependent). If you encounter any problems visit museek.ethz.ch or send an email to the developers.

Gonna try this out, been looking for something since i got my phone since probably 95% of the music on my phone is mixed. Thanks
 
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Has ANYONE found a freaking gapless playback capable player for Android?? Something so freaking simple and no one has created one?? Am I gonna have to learn how to create apps?? Geesz.

Just venting...a lot of sarcasm there. haha

Actually the problem of gapless playback of MP3 is a very challenging one to fix properly. Mostly because MP3 was never designed to handle it.

The reason ipad can do it, is purely because it's all locked into iTunes and apples content (much of which is AAC and more suited to gapless playback) All the content is encoded by apple and had the gapless metadata included in the files.

Gapless playback - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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OK, I hope anyone will still find my reply, I'm a bit late :)

Are there music players for Android that support gapless playback of WAV (!!!) files? I know I'm a bit strange, but I have stored all my music as plain WAV files because firstly, I wasn't patient enough to have them encoded to MP3 (it's slower than just "copying" them to WAV), and also, I'm a sound engineer and I'm *really* sensitive to sound degradation :)

So, anyone know? :)

Thanks
 
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The new version of museek (0.957) in the android market features (optional) gapless playback. Just enable it in the settings and adjust the value of the gap (device dependent). If you encounter any problems visit museek.ethz.ch or send an email to the developers.

Have tried this as well

It works much better than some of the others

No gaps, No pauses. Simples! :D


Just tried this player... all it does is give you an option to enter a time to subtract from the tracks in order to create gapless playback. Good luck guessing the time as I tried it on just one of my albums and never got close. (You enter the time in milliseconds, default is 1000ms)

Now considering that probably every album is going to have a completely different sized gap; you would be required to change the gap time every time you listened to music, not to mention how many times you will have to trial and error to get it right. This is not anywhere near a feasible solution in my opinion...
 
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I've been bumbling about the internet all day trying to find a solution to this myself. I'm certainly no expert, but from what I've read, the problem seems to be something like this:

The problem with gaps between tracks in audio playback isn't in the app itself, but in the operating system. Apparently, from what I've read, the component of the Android operating system that allows audio (and possibly video?) playback is called OpenCORE. The version of OpenCORE that's attached to Android 2.1 (and possibly 2.2 as well?) is version 2.0, but the gaps between tracks issues wasn't fixed until version 2.06 (or maybe 2.07?).

Apparently, however, OpenCORE has fallen out of grace with the opensource community. (I'm not sure of the details, but I read something about their software being not entirely opensource?) So even though OpenCORE has moved on to version 2.5 now, it's possible that the newer versions will never be applied to the official operating system installed on your phone.

Like I said: One day reading a few message boards on the internet does not make me a guru. It's possible that what I've read was completely off base. If so, I welcome any corrections.

I'm making the assumption that someone could code an audio playback interface from scratch or even use opensource libraries out there to accomplish gapless playback, but it's more than likely that such a thing would take up significantly more processing power and battery life than using the software built right into the operating system - and as far as mobile apps go, that's one thing that everyone seems to be trying to avoid.
 
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First off, Ipod/Itunes was not the first that has gapless playback. They were a few years behind from numerous other media players. So Mac fanboys, don't get so cocky. I had a music player (Pockettunes) in my Treo that had gapless playback way before Itunes had it in their computers. So there! :)

Yes, gapless has become somewhat of a standard, so it's a bit disconcerting that the stock Android music player doesn't do gapless. But for Android OS, there have been a few. Lithium Music Player ($1.99) and Museek (free) claim to have gapless. I haven't tried Lithium, but Museek's success is somewhat mixed, but I think this has mostly to do with MP3 files not always being consistently ripped. When I play Ogg files, I don't even have to set it gapless and it would do gapless. As someone said before, if you have Ogg files, then some standard players can have gapless playback. IMO, Ogg is the best compressed music files out there. You can smaller bitrates and it can sound better than higher bit rate MP3, so as a result you can have more songs on your SD cards.

It can be a pain to re-rip all your music files to Ogg, but there are softwares out there that you can convert your files into Ogg in batches. I use Winamp and it has converter plugins.

Meanwhile, you can test Lithium and see how it does. And I'd appreciate the feedback on that player.
 
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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.

You are right, this post is not helpful.

Maybe today's kids have never actually listened to an entire CD or album at one sitting, but most people probably have, and still would like to listen to their favorite albums without having a media player decide to insert a gap between tracks. How can anyone listen to a live recording when gaps are jammed in between every track? Mixed DJ cd's? Tracks with smooth transitions? This isn't rocket science, it should be simple choice ni the preferences.
 
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When you rip your music, just tell your player to make the gaps. No problem. Then you have them...Almost ALL music rippers have a gap set to default anyway. But for those of us that like to hear an album the way it was meant to be heard, I don't want that gap...And there are a LOT of us. Do a Google search on gapless playback and find out how big of an issue this is.

Not just mixed DJ CDs, but a lot of artists have intros to their songs, or their songs transition from one to another, a few examples I can think of: Tool, Pink Floyd, Madonna, Mars Volta, any concerts/live recordings,a lot of classical albums will have a song divided into different tracks...the list goes on and on...

The default setting for anything should always be the "non-destructive" one. Allow the user to add a gap where there wasn't one previously if you wish, but do not create a "destructive" product that changes the media you are trying to play.
 
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Currently, there is an "unstable" build of Rockbox for Droid that does gapless playback flawlessly, so it CAN be done, people. Rockbox has been doing this for years.

I use to listen to my music on a Sansa Clip and then a Sansa Fuze. None of them have gapless playback in them and Sansa would say it couldn't be done. Rockbox proved them wrong.

You can try the unstable build here: AndroidPort < Main < Wiki

Just be warned: the navigation is really wonky, but that is to be expected when it's not an official build yet. Just keep monitoring it and eventually, they will have an official build that should knock your socks off.

Oh, and Rockbox has always been completely free. No crippleware, adware, etc.
 
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