[jmb]

Karma owners,

I am selling my JB3, which I absolutely love and hate to part with, but it doesn't play gaplessly. I've tried all the alternatives, but nothing works.

Anyway, I will be buying a Rio Karma for it's gapless playback capabilities, so my question is:

Will it it play EAC/LAME --alt-preset standard (192/kbps VBR) Mp3's gaplessly?

 

[notnormal]

It's not true gapless playback but pseudo gapless playback, because mp3 is not a codec that supports gapless playback natively. But with lame encoded mp3s, they will have pseudo-gapless playback on the Karma.

 

[Bittergourd]

To my ears,
the Karma plays LAME APS MP3's flawlessly.

It has the best gapless playback ability among the MP3 players in the market at the moment anyway.

 

[C38368]

Quote:

Originally Posted by notnormal It's not true gapless playback but pseudo gapless playback, because mp3 is not a codec that supports gapless playback natively. But with lame encoded mp3s, they will have pseudo-gapless playback on the Karma.

I've heard this argument before, and honestly don't know enough about the format to dispute the claim.

However, I do know a thing or two about Rio Karmas, and I do know that they will play MP3 files that should not have a gap between them without a gap between them, with two exceptions that I've found: bad rips, and adding the second track into the playlist while the first is already playing. The former is self-explanatory. The latter will cause a small pause while the second track is loaded into memory, but only occurs in that situation (loading a whole album at once is fine).

 

[jmb]

That's good news, 'cause basically, what I am hoping is that if I add an album to the playlist, that the Karma will get rid of those annoying "clicks" between tracks on my live albums and seamlessly recorded studio albums that I had with the JB3.

I just wanted to know if LAME APS Mp3's posed a particular problem for the Karma as my entire collection is in that format.

So any comments/experiences from Karma owners is appreciatted.

Besides I would not want to use OGG files. Suck to much battery life I've heard.

 

[Edvard_Grieg]

MP3 is inherently not a gapless standard as was previously pointed out above. However, the Karma does a great job of making it sound gapless to the point that you would never know the difference.

Battery life, roughly:

MP3: 15+ hours
OGG: ~10 hours
FLAC: ~11 hours

 

[breez]

MP3 true gaplessness depends on whether the Karma can read the LAME tags and use them to create the gapless playback or does it just use some general method.

 

[notnormal]

jmb, ignore the technical details. For your purposes, lame encoded mp3s will do what you want on the Karma and appear to playback gaplessly

.

 

[xiang]

why u not just buy an Iriver IHP-120 or 140 then flash it with Rockbox, and u'll have gapless and muuuuuuuuch more features than the Rio Karma...

 

[pata2001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bittergourd To my ears, the Karma plays LAME APS MP3's flawlessly. It has the best gapless playback ability among the MP3 players in the market at the moment anyway.

Err, isn't it the ONLY one that can play MP3 gaplessly?

Really, I don't think there are any MP3 DAPs out there that can do gapless MP3 other than the Karma. If there is one, DAPreview would be all over it already. Some MP3 DAPs are "gapless" in a sense that they do not add any more gaps between tracks, but since MP3 itself is not gapless, then they are not gapless during track transitions.

As for whether Karma read the lame tags or not, from what I read so far, it can do "brute force" method, that it actively scans the music and truncate the gaps. So you'll have gapless either way.

 

[C38368]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pata2001 As for whether Karma read the lame tags or not, from what I read so far, it can do "brute force" method, that it actively scans the music and truncate the gaps. So you'll have gapless either way.

How do you mean by that? I'm not sure how exactly the Karma goes about playing gapless, but gaps remain where they should be, and stay gone where they sholdn't be. SQ issues aside, listening to an album on a Karma sounds exactly like listening to the album on a CD player or turntable.

@jmb~ No clicks, unless you have a bad rip or original.

 

[blessingx]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Edvard_Grieg MP3: 15+ hours OGG: ~10 hours FLAC: ~11 hours

Is this correct? Ogg Vorbis kills the battery quicker than FLAC? Wow.

And as others have said MP3 is not gapless. There's a LAME tag and another method I can't recall at the moment, but both are experimental (I believe the LAME tag isn't even developed anymore), not part of the MP3 spec, and I highly doubt read by the Karma. Simple test - are LAME MP3's the only MP3s played gaplessly? Doubt it. Again a brute force or mini crossfeed or whatever does it, but as stated the important thing is it works most of the time.

And for what it's worth, if you're on OS X, with ChapterTool and AudioBinder you can create single file/multi-chapter (thus track) gapless AAC files for the iPod, but you have to jump through a couple hoops to do it (see recent thread). Kinda a pain.

 

[notnormal]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blessingx Is this correct? Ogg Vorbis kills the battery quicker than FLAC? Wow.

FLAC uses integer arithmetic, Ogg Vorbis uses floating point arithmetic. Although FLAC's large file size is too large for the buffer, decoding it is less processor intensive then decoding Ogg Vorbis files.

As for gapless playback, I agree that commbining all the tracks as one file is the best method for codecs that aren't natively gapless. Even better when you can create/use bookmarks or chapters to identify the tracks.

 

[Febs]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pata2001 Err, isn't it the ONLY one that can play MP3 gaplessly? Really, I don't think there are any MP3 DAPs out there that can do gapless MP3 other than the Karma. If there is one, DAPreview would be all over it already. Some MP3 DAPs are "gapless" in a sense that they do not add any more gaps between tracks, but since MP3 itself is not gapless, then they are not gapless during track transitions.

As someone noted above, the iriver H120/H140 with Rockbox does gapless MP3 playback. And yes, it does it by reading the LAME header information: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/vie...rt_gapless_pla

 

[Emmanuel]

Ignore the HD-5 at your peril.