[Lilfurbal]

Ok, fair, I moved to version 1.2.5 on the DX50 to try to see if the gapless was ok, enabled gapless by setting it up to 5 seconds and no loss of music at the end of the first song but the next song started after a one second delay so not quite gapless. I changed the setting to 10 seconds and no difference. Gapless setting to close yielded the worse result with a two second lost at the end of the first song.

I think the crossfade is the most seamless setting so far on 1.2.6. The only thing I wish is for them to re-introduce true gapless with no delays whatsoever and make the cross fade optional. Now that would be a fantastic setup, everyone would be happy.

I am going to move back to 1.2.6 and check the gapless results with the same above setup.

 
I have to say, this is not the behavior I am experiencing with gapless on with firmware 1.2.5.  There is no lost audio at the end of flacs for me, if there it would interrupt tracks that roll into the next such as my live albums.  My transitions have been perfect where I cannot even identify the moment the tracks transition.  It is curious that you have different results however.

 

[Wapiti]

Originally Posted by musicheaven /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
"Makes sense if you still buy CDs which now is the least medium being purchased, now with music download, this does not apply any longer. I prefer the Apple gapless function, play the first song, stitch the second and play it immediately. It's simple, not complicated and more with our time."
 
Except that most tracks exist originally as an album.  Albums are often deliberately put together with varying lengths of silence between tracks.  This control of tempo determines how the album feels as a whole to the listener.  This timing of track presentation need be retained.
 
Of course, if you listen only to playlists or download only individual songs this does not apply.

 

[CobraMan]

Well - I will admit to being a dinosaur of sorts - just bought the Van Halen II remaster at B&N for about $6.50 with a 25% off coupon.  Lots and lots of $5 CDs these days at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, B&N, etc - not sure the downloads are that affordable - no?
 
What you describe about stitching songs together by removing any dead time thus creating a continuous play condition might be a good definition for gapless?  Replicating the original CD content faithfully (especially for albums like The Wall, Operation Mindcrime, Live performance, etc) should be the default - not called gapless, gapped, or anything else.
 
Of course, this is just my opinion and I could be wrong

!
 
Cheers,
Tim

 

[jj69]

As I shown, 1.2.5 gapless still did not fully work which is still surprising to me that most DX50 owners thought it did. Version 1.2.6 does not suffer from  a one second delay at the end of the first song when the second song starts so this is more gapless than the prior release. The only annoying thing is to force crossfade without asking for it, if it was optional then everything would be fine.

 
I think you're the only one having gapless issues with 1.2.5. 
 
Personally, I have had no issues with gapless on the DX50 since firmware 1.0.0. 
 
Are you sure the source files you're having issues with are even supposed to be gapless?  If they're sourced from CD, were they extracted properly? 

 

[musicheaven]

   
I think you're the only one having gapless issues with 1.2.5.
 
Personally, I have had no issues with gapless on the DX50 since firmware 1.0.0.
 
Are you sure the source files you're having issues with are even supposed to be gapless?  If they're sourced from CD, were they extracted properly?

They were downloads from iTunes that I purchased. It came as an album but not on CDs. I have never had any issues with those files on my iPhone, never had not even a second delay or any music chopped so you tell me, no gaps whatsoever so why should I have issues with them on the DX50?
 
My comparison was initially with the iPhone (I have the exact same files like I said), I made a copy of those on my DX50 and I was never able to make them play like on the iPhone without gaps, except with version 1.2.6 but again not a true gapless more crossfade but to me it feels seamless, not even a second delay just stiches right into the other song pretty much like my iPhone.
 
No biggie though, I am sure iBasso will fix the so called gapless playback on the next version so whatever I found won't matter too much.

 

[jj69]

  They were downloads from iTunes that I purchased. It came as an album but not on CDs. I have never had any issues with those files on my iPhone, never had not even a second delay or any music chopped so you tell me, no gaps whatsoever so why should I have issues with them on the DX50?
 
My comparison was initially with the iPhone (I have the exact same files like I said), I made a copy of those on my DX50 and I was never able to make them play like on the iPhone without gaps, except with version 1.2.6 but again not a true gapless.

 
I've never downloaded anything from iTunes in my life, so I can't even attempt to duplicate your issue. 

However, unless I'm mistaken, isn't everything on iTunes only available in a proprietary Apple format?  The gapless issues you're experiencing with your DX50 may very well be limited to whatever Apple format your files are in. 
 
If that's the case, it sort of makes sense that your iPhone can play them with no problem, but non-Apple devices like DX50 may have issues. 
 
What file format are they in?  Is it a lossy format or a lossless format? 

 

[ratinox]

Getting gapless playback perfect is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Apple's first four generations of iPods don't do gapless playback at all and I know they were trying around the 2nd or 3rd generations. And that's Apple, the biggest mobile music player outfit in the world. iBasso getting close to perfect on the first go? That's an accomplishment.

Retain timing? Use a CUE sheet. That's what they're for.

"As intended"? Bah. The only way that my music should be played is the way that I want to hear it. Same goes for every one of you reading this. Listen to your music the way you want to hear it however that may be. That's why these little, personal players exist.

 

[jj69]

"As intended"? Bah. The only way that my music should be played is the way that I want to hear it. Same goes for every one of you reading this. Listen to your music the way you want to hear it however that may be. That's why these little, personal players exist.

 
LOL.  "The way I want to hear it" is the way the composer/engineer "intended" it to be heard. 
 
So when I play back one of the live performances I recorded and mastered myself, I expect a player to play them back without inserting a gap of silence where I placed a track marker, therby interrupting the flow of the performance becuase the sound of the audience suddenly disappears for a second, and then out of nowhere returns a moment later. 

 

[musicheaven]

   
I've never downloaded anything from iTunes in my life, so I can't even attempt to duplicate your issue. 

However, unless I'm mistaken, isn't everything on iTunes only available in a proprietary Apple format?  The gapless issues you're experiencing with your DX50 may very well be limited to whatever Apple format your files are in.
 
If that's the case, it sort of makes sense that your iPhone can play them with no problem, but non-Apple devices like DX50 may have issues.
 
What file format are they in?  Is it a lossy format or a lossless format?

 
I did get some from them and it's convertible to other formats, you don't loose gapless by converting it. I have some MP3, MP4a AAC files as well I believe pretty much all kind of formats which none of them played without that one second delay so this seems to be an expected behavior. I believe the DX50 had no problems recognizing them so far I can play them all, the only file format I can't play on my iPhone are the FLACS which I also have on the DX50 and they play just fine in the RockBox iPod 5th Gen no gaps whatsoever there. So as you can see I was shocked to see that we needed to set the gapless function on the player I thought that came out of the box like the latest Apple products. Anyway Let's not spend much time on that I believe we have extended the subject ad nauseum. I am not going to loose sleep over gapless.

 

[Wapiti]

  LOL.  "The way I want to hear it" is the way the composer/engineer "intended" it to be heard. 

Precisely.
 
Yet, I have no objection to a options which strip silence, crossfades, add more silence, etc. if desired.

 

[musicheaven]

   
LOL.  "The way I want to hear it" is the way the composer/engineer "intended" it to be heard.
 
So when I play back one of the live performances I recorded and mastered myself, I expect a player to play them back without inserting a gap of silence where I placed a track marker, therby interrupting the flow of the performance becuase the sound of the audience suddenly disappears for a second, and then out of nowhere returns a moment later.

 
Here is the definition of gapless:
 
Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts (than timing related) at track boundaries should not be severed either. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio. The absence of gapless playback is a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks are meant to segue into each other, such as some classical music (opera in particular), progressive rock, concept albums, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.
 
Here you go now you can make your point

 

[jj69]

   
I did get some from them and it's convertible to other formats, you don't loose gapless by converting it. I have some MP3, MP4a AAC files as well I believe pretty much all kind of formats which none of them played without that one second delay so this seems to be an expected behavior. I believe the DX50 had no problems recognizing them so far I can play them all, the only file format I can't play on my iPhone are the FLACS which I also have on the DX50 and they play just fine in the RockBox iPod 5th Gen no gaps whatsoever there. So as you can see I was shocked to see that we needed to set the gapless function on the player I thought that came out of the box like the latest Apple products. Anyway Let's not spend much time on that I believe we have extended the subject ad nauseum. I am not going to loose sleep over gapless.

 
I take a different view on gapless.  If it doesn't work, the player is usless to me.  Total dealbreaker.  So I would lose plenty of sleep over it.  Had a bought a Colorfly C3 without first reading up on it her on Head-Fi, it would have been in the trash can within minutes, which is exactly where the Oppo player I bought a few years ago went when it refused to play gapless. 
 
However, I'm only concerned with FLAC (and I suppose WAV) files. 
 
I believe the formats you mention above (mp3, mp4, AAC) are all lossy formats.  Most of them do not have native support for gapless.  I know mp3 did not when it was deveoped.  Some time later, new codecs were released that support gapless mp3s.  To get gapless mp3 playback, the files must be encoded with a specific codec that supports gapless, and then played back with a player (or plugin) that supports that codec.  I didn't pay much attention to it because I very rarely use lossy formats.
 
As I said, I use only FLAC and occasionally WAV files.  If I receive files in another format (like APE or SHN, which I consider long dead formats), I immediately convert them to FLAC.  FLAC has native gapless support (as any format should if it's truly a lossless format).  So there is no reason for any competently designed player to have difficulty playing those files back without adding gaps between tracks. 
 
I think what may be going on with the files you bought on iTunes is due to the conversion process.  If you converted those proprietary Apple format files to another file format (like FLAC or mp3), the gaps may have been caused by the software you used to perform the conversion.  You state above that "you don't lose gapless by converting," but what makes you so sure of that?  If you're converting from any file format to mp3, the resulting mp3 files will probably have gaps (unless the encoder specifically supports gapless mp3 encoding). 

 

[headwhacker]

   
Here is the definition of gapless:
 
Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts (than timing related) at track boundaries should not be severed either. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio. The absence of gapless playback is a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks are meant to segue into each other, such as some classical music (opera in particular), progressive rock, concept albums, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.
 
Here you go now you can make your point

 
And that's exactly how I wanted gapless to work or no gapless at all. 

 

[ratinox]

And that's exactly how I wanted gapless to work or no gapless at all.

Problem is... how can a program tell if a given span of silence is intentional or an artifact of the media mastering or encoding processes?
Short answer: it can't without external assistance. If you don't provide a file with accurate timing information (read: a CUE sheet) or the equivalent then the player has to make calculated guesses.

 

[musicheaven]

Problem is... how can a program tell if a given span of silence is intentional or an artifact of the media mastering or encoding processes?
Short answer: it can't without external assistance. If you don't provide a file with accurate timing information (read: a CUE sheet) or the equivalent then the player has to make calculated guesses.

+1
 
When you record music, it is up to the sound engineer in accordance with the musician to end the track in the manner they see fit, so it could be an instant drop outside of the 0 db volume or could be a fade out lasting 3 to 5 seconds and then crossing the 0 db sound line. It is pretty much opened. Then next tune can have a fade in or start abruptly so as you described unless you have some CUE sheets it is pretty much open ended as to how you think it will go.