Gapless Playback with XLD

Hey Guys,

I know that the not existing gapless playback of the HM-801 and HM-602/1 is a huge letdown for a lot of persons including myself. Now those players are capable of playing cue sheet files. In essence this means that you rip a music CD as one large track and the cue sheet will tell the player exactly when a song starts and ends so therefore you can jump to each seperate song within the file of your ripped CD.

Many members have expressed problems with this procedure (and so have I), but I know figured out how to work this correctly on my Mac:

First of I use a programm called XLD which receives very frequent updates. It will make bit correct rips of your CD, which you will want if you are already going the lossless route. Now when you are on the title screen selecting what songs should get converted you have a drop down menu where you can choose just how the conversion shall work. Here you need to choose "Save all titles as one image file (+cue sheet)".

Once it's done you can simply copy all your music to you player and select the cue sheet file from the proper menu. Mind you that you will have to use the right arrow button vice the select button as usual to start playing the desired song out of the cue sheet file.

Hopefully this is helpful for a few people here.

I circumvented that problem by naming all my flac and cue files first by artist and then by the name of the album. That way they are in an alphabetical order so everything is easy to use.

Hmmm...let me think...gapless playback perhaps? ;-)

Seriously though, I wouldn't go through all the trouble of reripping my entire CD collection (and in the process realizing how some CDs are scratched beyond any bit exact copy :-( ), if gapless wasn't so important to me. Also archiving wise it really makes no difference whether you have one large flac with cue sheet or several separate songs, because I can simply extract separate files via the cue sheet if I really need too.

For me it also had the advantage of finally making bit exact copies of my CDs as I switches from iDevices with Apple lossless to the Hifiman with flac, but I only reencoded the Apple lossless files. Technically it shouldn't be audible, but at least now I can put my mind at ease about that ;-)

1.) Yes XLD does make a wonderful job in that and I'm sure it will be supported for a while. Your other point about searching songs I don't quite follow. Usually I purchase a CD and I listen to it and I recognize their songs. I know who is who in my library. Besides this is just a workaround for gapless playback on the hifiman anyway and for archiving. I don't touch that harddisk again until I need it. 

I might need to say though, that I don't listen to music at home. I only listen to music via my Hifiman anyway.

2.) The way I see it, if I already have a filesystem corruption destroy one of my songs then I will have to rerip it from CD as well. It is not going to make a big change if I do it for the song or the entire album.

Also I believe that with all the journaling and other features implemented by the OS two prevent such corruptions to occur/cause damage it is actually more likely that my harddisk will just simply fail and all data is lost. But that is a problem all archives have to fight with isn't it?

3.) Actually the majority of my CDs DO require gapless playback to be enjoyed. I mostly listen to progressive and experimental metal where concept albums are very common and as such usually the songs are supposed to be one unity anyway. Example? How about Pain of Salvations "Be" or my all time favorite for gapless playback Tools "Lateralus"? The transition between "Parabol" and "Parabola" is just unbearable without gapless playback. In fact I haven't listened to that album for a while because of that reason. Sounds crazy? Perhaps, but we are all crazy about music that's the very reason why we are all here isn't it?

Frankly I don't want to argue with you over this, in the end it comes down to where you place your priorities. I saw that quite a few people had a problem with the gapless playback via cue sheets on the Hifiman here in this forum hence I wanted to show that it is possible.

For me it really makes no difference having my files separate or as one large album. Either way they are archived on my harddisk and as such both ways have to cope with possibly failures in the hardware.

Ok I guess my celebration was a little premature: Obviously the firmware on the Hifiman is broken, because it does not jump to the right time tracks in the cue sheets. Now this one is odd and I tried a few things out. First I thought something is wrong with XLD and the way it puts the time stamp into the cue sheets. This would have been the worst case scenario because then all the files would have been useless as an archive. I played the flac files through vlc and jumped to the exact position that were saved in the cue sheets and they fit. So nothing wrong with the cue sheets.

Must be the player then. Here is when it starts getting interesting. The Hifiman seems to jump to the right time stamp at least it shows exactly the same time that was also in the cue sheets. But the sound is off by at least a few second and gets worse the longer you go into the album. Oh and it is jumping before and not after the start off a new song. 

What could be the possible explanation for this? Does somebody have a workaround? I'm afraid this will have to be address by a firmware update but we haven't seen those in a while...