Shanling M3X Portable Player - Our smallest Android Player

[fish1050]

Actually this cutoff issue is surprisingly common.
I've met this issue in Fiio X1 II, Shanling M3s, Q1, M5s, Hiby R3 Pro and so on.
It's a matter of syncronizing the hardware and start of file playback.
There should be some one second delay of playback. But nobody fixed this issue (if met).
Regarding M3X I can recommend using foobar2000 for example. Perfect gapless, no cutoff, it just works as it should.

I guess if it bothers you could use an app like Audacity to chop the dead air from the beginning and end off each track and not use gapless. I have actually done this with some of my older tracks which tend to have more dead air. I also splice out the minutes of dead air in the middle of really long tracks. I never saw the point of all that dead space and having to wait endlessly for the second half of the track to play. Are we meant to ponder the greatness of the first half of the song before we get to hear the other half?

 

[bachankas]

I guess if it bothers you could use an app like Audacity to chop the dead air from the beginning and end off each track and not use gapless. I have actually done this with some of my older tracks which tend to have more dead air. I also splice out the minutes of dead air in the middle of really long tracks. I never saw the point of all that dead space and having to wait endlessly for the second half of the track to play. Are we meant to ponder the greatness of the first half of the song before we get to hear the other half?

I think you do not understand.
What should I chop? The whole point of gapless is seamless transition between the track. In SHanling app you hear a silence between tracks. It is annoying then listening to a lot of live albums of some progressive music albums when all song are connected into one.
And back to cutoff issue - you would need to actually add some silence to the beginning of every song to sync it with this cutoff.

But still, gapless playback was z common feature since at least 10 years (considering Rockbox even more). The lack of gapless is 2022 is ridiculous.
It is a basic feature now like a remote for TV or AC in a car.
Shanling should slow down with releasing new DAPs slightly and put more effort into the improvement of the app.

 

[fish1050]

I think you do not understand.
What should I chop? The whole point of gapless is seamless transition between the track. In SHanling app you hear a silence between tracks. It is annoying then listening to a lot of live albums of some progressive music albums when all song are connected into one.
And back to cutoff issue - you would need to actually add some silence to the beginning of every song to sync it with this cutoff.

But still, gapless playback was z common feature since at least 10 years (considering Rockbox even more). The lack of gapless is 2022 is ridiculous.
It is a basic feature now like a remote for TV or AC in a car.
Shanling should slow down with releasing new DAPs slightly and put more effort into the improvement of the app.

Oh I do get it, my point was simply if this issue is pretty much a given with most DAP's then it isn't likely to go away any time soon. So you can keep buying DAP's and be disappointed, angry and frustrated every time or you can create your own solution and stop expecting the problem to be fixed. Clearly fixing this gapless issue isn't a priority for most DAP makers. If Shanling has managed to fix it with the M3X then great problem solved.

But personally I am not going buy a DAP simply because it might implement gapless without the delay. I did the dead space stripping over the course of a year on my collection and I do it as a matter of course on all new music I get. I haven't needed to use gapless in over a year and I am perfectly happy with my listening experience. I can strip an entire album in about 10 minutes so it isn't that big a deal at least for me.

You are right, in this day and age this should not be an issue. But running a business for many years I stopped counting on other people to do their jobs. I find a way to do it myself if I can.

 

[vext01]

@bachankas's point is that no amount of dead air stripping will make playback gapless if the player software can't do gapless. I think he is correct.

EDIT: sorry, highlighted wrong user.

 

[fish1050]

@bachankas's point is that no amount of dead air stripping will make playback gapless if the player software can't do gapless. I think he is correct.

EDIT: sorry, highlighted wrong user.

Well all I know is when I listen to music without gapless on my Q1 and the dead space removed I get a virtually seemless transition between tracks and no delay at the start of any track. It may not be absolutely perfect but it is pretty damn close. I stopped expecting perfection a long time ago. Nothing in this world is ever perfect but pretty damn close is better than nothing.

All you can do is try it and if you are still not happy you may at least be a little closer to the desired result. At my age I can't afford to wait for things to maybe get fixed someday. Better slightly imperfect now than never perfect later. Heck someday if the problem does get fixed then maybe the missing dead air will make gapless work even better, it probably won't be any worse.

I guess if you are an album listener you could merge all of the album tracks into one long track if you prefer. Just set the DAP's to save by track position and you could stop after any song you want and resume play later. Again not a perfect solution but a workaround none the less.

 

[mark88888]

What I'm not understanding about this conversation is, we are just talking about the Shanling player app itself that can't do gapless, right? Not the device? So aren't there other apps that are easily installed that do have gapless playback? And if so, why is it a major problem? The Shanling app has quite a few bugs apart from the no gapless thing, anyway. So I've been using UAPP due to some of the other bugs (don't care about gapless), and it's basically perfect. So why not just use that, if it has gapless capability? Or another?

 

[bachankas]

What I'm not understanding about this conversation is, we are just talking about the Shanling player app itself that can't do gapless, right? Not the device? So aren't there other apps that are easily installed that do have gapless playback? And if so, why is it a major problem? The Shanling app has quite a few bugs apart from the no gapless thing, anyway. So I've been using UAPP due to some of the other bugs (don't care about gapless), and it's basically perfect. So why not just use that, if it has gapless capability? Or another?

I agree, I use third party app.
But then, what's the point of releasing company own app, raising the costs of development and raising the price?
In this case it is better to preinstall other app and sell the whole DAP cheaper.

 

[vext01]

Well, I do like the idea of using the stock Shanling app without having to install anything from app stores. Especially since many apps Ive installed off apkpure either don't behave right or sound right on the M3X.

For example Hiby Music is unstable and crashes. Poweramp is really quiet and doesn't sound right if you turn it up. Many apps output at a fixed 386khz (or whatever) sample rate, which probably means wasting battery with upsampling.

The one exception to the rule I've found is musicolet. Once you change the decoder to "system decoder", everything works as it should.

I know many people like UAPP, but is there a way to install it without play store? It's not on apkpure, and there's no way I'm typing my google password into a device running Android 7!

 

[vext01]

(deleted duplicate post)

 

[vext01]

(deleted duplicate post)

 

[dharmasteve]

I have to say that I use UAPP, Amazon HD, the HiBy app and the Shanling app and really don't find a problem. I like the sound a lot, it does everything I want....the only thing that it's could do with for me is another 1Ghz of Ram.....but it is worth every penny I paid.

 

[ElKabong]

Well, I do like the idea of using the stock Shanling app without having to install anything from app stores. Especially since many apps Ive installed off apkpure either don't behave right or sound right on the M3X.

For example Hiby Music is unstable and crashes. Poweramp is really quiet and doesn't sound right if you turn it up. Many apps output at a fixed 386khz (or whatever) sample rate, which probably means wasting battery with upsampling.

The one exception to the rule I've found is musicolet. Once you change the decoder to "system decoder", everything works as it should.

I know many people like UAPP, but is there a way to install it without play store? It's not on apkpure, and there's no way I'm typing my google password into a device running Android 7!

I use musicolet on my M3X and find it a good player, the default music app is not for me at all.

 

[Ferdze]

For me, I don't really care much about the stock music player not having a gapless playback. by now many people actually have a preferred music player in their phones and what's important for me is that i can install it already when i bought this device. There are tons of free and paid music apps out there to complain about the stock music player which is free already. there are dac amps out there that doesn't even have a GUI

 

[bachankas]

I have tried PowerAmp... Wow! Beautiful GUI with plenty of customisation, live it! I Wonder how I live with Android since 7-8 years and I did not meet PowerAmp..

 

[Shanling]

I have tried PowerAmp... Wow! Beautiful GUI with plenty of customisation, live it! I Wonder how I live with Android since 7-8 years and I did not meet PowerAmp..

Poweramp is quite popular on our players. Just make sure you have it setup correctly, at default it's forcing quite a lot of its DSP, resamplers, volume controls.