Gapless play?

[Stenu]

Hi,

I've been trying to experiment with the gapless play option, and can not get exact results with it. I wonder why the gaps exist at all with formats like .ape? Converting two tracks to wav, and putting them together in a wave editor gives a perfect sample-level match, why does not the player just put the following track after the previous track in the same stream?

Thanks,
Stenu

[Spoon]

The gap is where there is a latency of a few tens of miliseconds (mine is 50ms) whilst the soundcard is able to output the 2nd stream, even with special ASIO drivers the latency tends to be 10 ms.

[Stenu]

Hi,

Spoon, thanks for the response.

I understand the latency of the drivers and soundcard (good cards with ASIO can reach much lower than 10ms). But you can always continue the same stream without waiting the previous to finish, with just appending the next track data to the end of the previous. This is if the player actually knows the next track before the previous is finished? Does it, or does the queue exist in the MMC instead of the player process?

I know these gaps does not mean much to many of the users, tracks start and end, that's it, but as a fan of classical music, it really does matter, many classical works consist of longer movements that are divided into tracks, and the music continues from one track to the next.

Thanks,
Stenu

[RossRoy]

Hi Stenu,

why don't you just rip your classical cd that contain gapless tracks as one long file? That's what I did, being a classical (and opera) fan myself.

I ripped each act of Parsifal by Wagner as one long file. Now, if I could only get rid of the fade ins and outs of the CD changes.

Ross

[Stenu]

Hi RossRoy,

Thanks, that's an option, but I like to have the part names and other possible information for each track.

-Stenu

[Spoon]

5 seconds before the end it prepares the 2nd track, buffers data and pauses that sound card stream, it is not able to tack it on the end incase the audio format is different.

[Paddy]

Spoon, you said your sound card had a latency of 50ms. I'm guessing all sound cards are different, so do you know how we can calculate the latency of our own?

I've got gapless set at default of 80ms, but sometimes the next tracks starts just before the last track had finished. So I'm guessing the gap should be increased (or decreased!) but by how much?

Thanks

Paddy

[Stenu]

Hi Spoon,

In case the audio format is different, then it's obvious you must start a new stream. But it's not obvious when the format is same, and most of the time it is, when we are talking about listening whole albums.

Regards,
Stenu