Talk:Gapless playback

What?
When I heard the word gapless I thought it may mean that it was used to remove dead air during playback. This would be useful in playing back audio from a recording of a meeting, lecture or a podcast. Much of the audio is composed of gaps between words and speakers. It could not be used during the playing of music (or story telling) because timing is important. If it is used to remove the gap at the beginning of the track then why not just remove the gap at the beginning of the track.

If crossfade is used then I would think that the silence at the end of a track would fade into the silence of the following track. The results would be dead air between tracks.

Lacks clarity
So basically gapless playback allows one track on an album immediately to follow the next? The article doesn't say these exactly. There seem to be about two sentences directly describing gapless playback and many, many more circling around the topic. If someone who knows more about this could add a section toward the top specifically describing gapless playback, that would be much appreciated.

Theshibboleth 08:46, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Err doesn't the very first line say that clear enough "Gapless playback is the seamless playback of digital audio formats. It allows live music or consecutive tracks to be heard exactly as they are mastered, without gaps between tracks" --C Hawke 08:59, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

NO!

Biased
How are iTunes 7 and Windows Media not "Optimal Solutions" when they are easily the most widely used gapless solutions out there?

— also why does iTunes 7 have 'basic' gapless support? It works perfectly, what else do you want?


 * I just installed iTunes 7 - the gaps might be smaller (it's hard to be sure), but it's not perfectly gapless, by any means. Unless I've done something wrong (I've turned off crossfading which, according to iTunes help, means gapless playback will be globally applied), Apple still have some work to do before they can claim truly gapless playback. David 02:33, 16 September 2006 (UTC) PS Mine is an early Nano, so that may be the reason it's not perfectly seamless.


 * iTunes 7 does gapless playback perfectly for me, with iTunes-encoded MP3s and AAC files. No gaps, not even itty bitty tiny ones.  Perfectly seamless. -- Moondigger 05:03, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Windows Media Player 9 on Windows XP also does gapless playback perfectly form me, with WMA files. Never tried with MP3 files, tough. Joaopaulo1511 (talk) 02:30, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

I was just about to ask the same thing. I've used Winamp for years and it's my favorite, but that's my opinion. This here is someone else's opinion. Can we get some info on what makes these non-optimal, aside from brand recognition?--Deusexaethera 02:41, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't know exactly how Winamp's gapless playback works, but it's not truly gapless because it can fail if you don't tweak the output plugin's buffering settings. Also, the seekbar can act weirdly at track boundaries as a side effect. --Kjoonlee 16:57, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Dispute over iPod gapless?
Is there a reference for the claim that's just been inserted, that there is dispute as to whether iPods with the latest firmware can play gaplessly? All I know for sure is that they managed to vastly shorten the gaps on 1st gen Nanos, but not remove them completely. I understood that all iPods after that were now gapless-capable.

There's a link to a petition, but it probably dates from before the firmware updates. David 10:35, 3 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I have confirmed both with multiple users on the ilounge forums and with my own iPod that the gapless playback feature works seamlessly with: iTunes-encoded MP3s (even those encoded with old versions of iTunes); iTunes-encoded AACs (even those encoded with old versions of iTunes); iTunes music store AAC files; most MP3s encoded with other tools. Based on complaints registered in various forums, many of those complaining that gapless playback doesn't work seamlessly on their iPods don't understand that most of their music was never meant to play back gaplessly and wasn't recorded that way in the first place, or have music files that were encoded with "unknown" encoders. -- Moondigger 19:57, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

A way to measure
If you want to be more scientific about claims like "not perfectly gapless", "itty bitty tiny gaps" and "seamless":

Just do an analog recording of a transition and compare it to the original tracks. Using a sound editor (like audacity), it is (in my experience) easy enough to manually correlate clips all down to the nearest sample. When the two originals are correlated with the recording, count the samples of gap between them, or look at the timeline and calculate the diff. --129.241.30.97 (talk) 17:34, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Worse than gaps
You need to get the music all matched up (tempo near an integer factor, pitches not clashing, etc.) to make this nice. When that is unreasonable, it's better to leave a gap. The player's "random" shuffle could try to make this easy by having a mild preference for songs that match up well. A bit of pitch/tempo bending may be needed. See also: Beatmatching, Beatmixing, Harmonic mixing. 24.110.144.116 19:55, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
 * That isn't very relevant. Gapless playback isn't about crossfading of unrelated tracks; it's just the preservation of timing. --Kjoonlee 20:09, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Links moved to Fade (audio engineering). --Kjoonlee 20:30, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Gapless and glitch-free
"It should be noted, however, that while using metadata will ensure that the right amount of samples are played, it does not preclude the encoder from encoding the end of (or the beginning of) a track as just that, which can lead to glitches in the transition. Currently the only available solution to this problem is to rip the album in question as an image plus cue sheet, encode the album to the desired format as a single file, then split the resulting file into individual tracks with the aid of the cue sheet. Although this solution is the best available as it avoids both pops and glitches, the process can be tedious and player support for it is relatively low."

Here's some more information, including a test, for the case of mp3.
 * I don't think that's really true. --Kjoonlee 17:59, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh now I get it. Transform coding artifacts at track boundaries. Hmm. --Kjoonlee 18:02, 1 November 2009 (UTC)


 * As I understand that link, the encoder fools itself by the artificial step between actual data and its own zero padding. According to my understanding of lossy compression, such noise should smear out in both directions, thereby polluting the actual data. I tested this on a sine wave that I cut on a maximum, and can confirm the problem both audibly and visually (using Audacity), for vorbis (libvorbis) and mp3 (lame). For mp3, there was (as expected) high frequency noise echoes in both directions, followed by (unexpected) amplitude fluctuations. For vorbis, I got no artifact whatsoever on first try, but when making the transition on a different maximum, I got the last sample of the first file near zero.--129.241.30.97 (talk) 17:34, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

bad tags on the article
Does the article still contain «excessive, poor or irrelevant examples» (tagged August 2010), or can we remove that now?--129.241.30.97 (talk) 08:20, 11 May 2012 (UTC) I guess not. Removing tag.84.209.119.158 (talk) 14:36, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

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