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Both iTunes and Spotify have perfect gapless playback for me - I wouldn't use them if not, as I listen to quite a lot of electronic mix CDs and any gap ruins th
by tommyd 11y ago
Both iTunes and Spotify have perfect gapless playback for me - I wouldn't use them if not, as I listen to quite a lot of electronic mix CDs and any gap ruins the flow.
On iTunes it does depend if the source was ripped properly (e.g. with iTunes itself), some older mp3s do not have the necessary additional data for proper gapless (I believe it is due to the overlapping nature of FFT windows - each frame in the mp3 depends on the previous/next frame to fully reconstruct the audio, so the encoder has to store "extra" frames at the start and end) so these will have little glitches.
On Spotify I guess individual sources may have issues (just like a few are obviously ripped from CDs which skip!) but the Chemical Brothers transition you mentioned plays perfectly for me. Maybe check you have "crossfade tracks" disabled in Spotify's advanced settings.
- gagege 11y agoWhat music do you listen to? Because I have literally never found an album that does gapless. Does the free version not get gapless playback?
- tommyd 11y agoHouse, techno, general electronic stuff. Here's an example of an (excellent) mix album split into tracks that plays perfectly for me: https://open.spotify.com/album/4ZYcd1FAY9GjtIphGqL4Ot https://open.spotify.com/album/4ZYcd1FAY9GjtIphGqL4Ot (and I mean perfectly, I'm pretty anal about these things ;))
- Intermernet 11y agoThanks for the reply, I'll do some checks, but I'm pretty sure that I have crossfade disabled in spotify, and will double check my settings in other players. Interesting to hear "older mp3s do not have the necessary additional data". Do you happen to know when this info was introduced? Is it stored in the ID3 header, or in the actual MP3 data? Can I "losslessly" change the files to fix this? I'm especially interested as Google Music will happily replace tracks from my (backed up) library with "matched" tracks, but it still gets the track timing slightly wrong, even when played through other media players. It doesn't seem to matter where they come from, they don't reliably play "gaplessly".
- tommyd 11y agoI have no idea I'm afraid, just going off a fuzzy memory. This seems to go into a lot more detail than I ever could: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Gapless_playback http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Gapless_playback. There's no way to go back and fix old files, but I know iTunes has done flawless gapless (when the source files are good, e.g. ripped from CD in iTunes) for about 10 years (I remember getting the firmware update on my black iPod video, ahhh now that was a beautiful looking bit of kit! Not very waterproof as it turns out though...) Google Music doesn't play gapless properly, which is incredibly annoying, and indeed I struggled to get any player on Android to play gapless as well as iTunes. Poweramp was the closest I could find. Ended up going back to iPhone for that and other reasons. Not sure how iTunes Match handles gapless as I could never get it to upload my library properly, never mind play it back... I still feel there is a big gap in the market for a really good cloud music repository. Hopefully Spotify can get in to that space, their player is the best out of the ones I've tried (though still a lot of room for improvement). I did try using Subsonic briefly but the clients were horrible.
- tommyd 11y agoAlso see my reply above for an example of an album that plays seamlessly for me in Spotify. It may just be that I have got lucky, to be fair quite a lot of the mix CDs I listen to on Spotify are uploaded as one single hour-plus long track so would always be gapless.