[CSMR]

Many DAPs don't offer gapless playback. Is this true for all file formats or just some? (I heard something about mp3 files having to be a multiple of a certain length which I can imagine would give problems for lossless playback.)

I am going to encode my lossless collection and I need to choose a format. If any format is more condusive to gapless playback then it would be helpful to know.

 

[trains are bad]

I know flac and lame mp3 support gapless.

 

[gorman]

FLAC and Vorbis are natively gapless. Players still need to be capable of handling it, though.

LAME MP3 can be gapless with some workaround that appeared at a certain time during the development of the codec (there are extra tags memorized to store the exact length of a song). Again, players need to support this.

 

[jonnywolfet]

atrac is gapless on sony products.

 

[CSMR]

OK, thanks for the info. In general would you say that players which are not gapless are having difficulty with particular formats or are they just useless and unable to play back even wavs gaplessly?

 

[The D]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CSMR OK, thanks for the info. In general would you say that players which are not gapless are having difficulty with particular formats or are they just useless and unable to play back even wavs gaplessly?

It is the later

 

[K2Grey]

As far as I can remember the only thing that matters is the player. If the player is gapless, it will manage to play pretty much any format it supports gaplessly. And if the player is not gapless the only way you'll get gapless playback is by fusing the files together as 1 big one.

 

[The D]

Quote:

Originally Posted by K2Grey As far as I can remember the only thing that matters is the player. If the player is gapless, it will manage to play pretty much any format it supports gaplessly. And if the player is not gapless the only way you'll get gapless playback is by fusing the files together as 1 big one.

Mp3 and AAC cannot play gapless without a tag which has the exact end time of the track (LAME and Nero have this tag) and the player reads it.

 

[Csidinim]

crossfade has been one proven workaround that. that is how the karma was gapless and rockbox too. actually im not sure if you turn off the crossfade it would remain gapless, if the two are mutually exclusive. but yeah, look for crossfade, which any rockbox capable unit can do with rockbox.

 

[Febs]

Rockbox does NOT fake gapless playback through crossfade. Crossfade is a completely independent feature.

There are two things that a player needs to do in order to play back gaplessly:

1. Buffer the next song so that the player can play it immediately following the currently-playing track without having to stop for a moment to load the next song; and

2. For MP3, read the tags in a file that tell the player how many null frames there are at the end of file.

Rockbox does both of these, and that's why it plays gapless.

Some players fake or approximate gapless playback using crossfade or by deleting silence. Such players will delete gaps between ALL tracks, even gaps that were intended by the mastering engineer to be there. Rockbox does not delete anything; it simply plays the music without inserting additional gaps.

 

[K2Grey]

Rockbox indeed doesn't use crossfade, it plays things right after each other without pause just like say foobar2000.

I'm pretty sure the Karma was able to accomplish perceptual gapless playback, though, even with mp3s which technically did not support being played gaplessly.

 

[jonnywolfet]

i have found that on creative players perticularely, there is a smaller gap between mp3/128kbps and mp3/320kbps. must be to do with loading the buffer.