Gapless playback?

@slanted wrote:

People buy the Fuze for the video playback?

 

Really?

 

I bought my Fuze at the end of January and I like it quite a lot. But back then there was some suggestion that gapless playback would be included in the next firmware update. I do feel vaguely duped by its non-appearance, and it seems very likely we’re never gonna get it.

I would guess that for everyperson who has playback issues with the Fuze, there are 4-5 who have no problem with it. I have found a unique use for the videos. I do a lot of work in Adobe Flash. What I can do is create the flash file and then use Flash to make it a mpeg and SMC to add to the player and I can use it to show clients the video. 

Gappless has been in the works for a while. We always hope its in the next Firmware, but so far it hasnt been. It will happen eventually I am confident.

The video feature works for me, even though it’s not really practical on a small player. Also, Conversionbox and Sansafix are right, they are trying to work on it, so just say thank you and enough, it’s not like there are any bugs that you are complaining about, just a new feature that was never officially said to be coming.

So appreciate what you’ve got: The cheapest, best-sounding player in the market.

I’m not too sure about gapless playback, but I’m positive that I’ve found a gapless thread.

14 pages, not a gap in sight.

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

@neutron_bob wrote:

I’m not too sure about gapless playback, but I’m positive that I’ve found a gapless thread.

 

14 pages, not a gap in sight.

 

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

At least no one has suggested dap-less playback yet

incredible! So many people requesting this feature but from SanDisk no comment appart that they are looking at it.

@Admins: Is there a concreate timeframe about this feature release or will it not be implemented?

I would appriciate if you would be clear on that. Thank you.

@imoamo: I want gapless playback too, that’s for sure. But that’d not be the way I ask for it.

Remember, Sandisk has no duty to add the feature. They didn’t tell you “this player will have gapless playback in the future” when you bought your Fuze, right?

I was satisfied with my Fuze the day I bought it, and is even more so after all these excellent updates. I think Sandisk will eventually implement gapless playback, due to popular request. BUT, they won’t do that because they have to, they do that to keep their customers happy. So please, keep it calm, and what happens will happen!

People are greedy.

@justme wrote:

 

People are greedy.

It’s not greed.  I have many albums where tracks have to play gaplessly.  Abbey Road, for example.  If you add gaps between the tracks, it’s not the same album.  I’d rather suffer the annoying Ipod wheel a little while longer than have a player that interferes with the intended playback.

I was about to buy, but this is a deal breaker.  I’ll look forward to buying when this is fixed!

Just what justme said, I was happy with my Fuze when I first bought it. I soon realized the annoying gap, but I thought to myself, Whatever. There’s nothing I can do about it (that was before I ever found out there were firmware updates; I only had two mp3 players before my Fuze, a not so great RCA, and a Clip). I have a couple of albums that would be better without the gap, but I can live with it.

 "ONE FINAL NOTE

Go and look at the Ipod forums. They dont have gapless and the development teams there DONT CARE! They arent even working on it."

As a matter of fact ipods aren’t technology, are Marie Claire magazine gadgets…

Ipod guys generally don’t want to know what’s a bitrate or a codec. 

Competition must bring to somewhere else.

Have you read this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless\_playback

“AAC in MP4 encoded with iTunes (current and previous versions) is gapless in iTunes 7.0 onwards, 2nd generation iPod nanos, all video-capable iPods with the latest firmware…”

Taken from this section on the web page:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless\_playback

Format support

Since lossless data compression excludes the possibility of the introduction of padding, all lossless audio file formats are inherently gapless.

These lossy audio file formats have provisions for gapless encoding:

Some other formats do not officially support gapless encoding, but some implementations of encoders or decoders may handle gapless metadata.

  • LAME-encoded MP3 can be gapless with players that support the LAME Mp3 info tag.
  • AAC in MP4 encoded with Nero Digital from Nero AG can be gapless with foobar2000, latest XMMS2, and iTunes 7.1.1.5 onwards.
  • AAC in MP4 encoded with iTunes (current and previous versions) is gapless in iTunes 7.0 onwards, 2nd generation iPod nanos, all video-capable iPods with the latest firmware, and recent versions of foobar2000.
  • iTunes-encoded MP3 is gapless when played back in iTunes 7.0 onwards, 2nd generation iPod nanos, and all video-capable iPods with the latest firmware.
  • ATRAC on both MiniDisc and NW WalkMans is gapless through the use of time codes

Gah! I hate Wikipedia.

“In my days I had to really search for info”… lol

It only tells half the story. iPods didn’t have gapless for YEARS and in fact was only added VERY recently after consumers demanded it. Y’know… kinda’ like what is happening here. I am pretty confident Sansa will implement it… only hope they do so on the Fuze and not the next gen model.

Message Edited by Peregrine on 04-30-2009 09:22 AM

will177 wrote: .

These lossy audio file formats have provisions for gapless encoding:

 

Speex?  Nice to know, but considering that speex is intended for speech I’d be surprised if a typical format induced gap (10-20 ms) would be noticed unless the file break was in the middle of a syllable.  Anyhow it is more about high compression than sounding pretty.

I do use speex on my sansa (the one with Rockbox) as it can store audiobooks at ~ 5 MB/hour. 

JayK – very informative, thanks!

Most albums are encoded at the same time – surely this means they will usually have the same bitrate for each track, or am I missing something?  Also, how does it work for variable bitrate (VBR) files?

I would be happy even if gapless playback was ogg or FLAC only (at least initially), and only between tracks of the same bitrate.  I’m sure most people would welcome minimal support at first, as even if most of their tracks are in MP3 format.  There are only a handful (in my case anyway) that would benefit from gapless–it wouldn’t need much work for the user to reencode in whatever format SanDisk decided to support first.

i switched to a rockboxed sansa C240 to get gapless.

gapless has nothing to do with the audio files/format you use - it’s all in the players firmware.

if you are a “shuffle” type and don’t listen to albums/concerts you’ll never notice or really care about gapless.

but if you listen to albums and concerts, it                will                       annoy                you        sooner                                   or                                       later.

gapless has nothing to do with the audio files/format you use - it’s all in the players firmware.

 

That’s wrong. If the file format introduces a gap, which exact length cannot be told from a tag or so, no firmware in the world can remove it. And I think (almost) all compression formats do introduce such a gap, but only some of them also store the information neccessary to remove it while decoding.

There is of course another gap that comes from things done in the firmware (like waiting until the first song finishes, and only then starting to fill some buffer with data from the next one), but even if the firmware does a perfect job here there still can remain a gap because of the file formats insufficiency.

@emagon4523 wrote:

 

gapless has nothing to do with the audio files/format you use - it’s all in the players firmware.

 

mp3 does not allow an arbitrary number of samples in a frame, and no official standard way to specify the number of unused samples in the last frame, so it inherently has gaps.  

@emagon4523 wrote:

i switched to a rockboxed sansa C240 to get gapless.

 

gapless has nothing to do with the audio files/format you use - it’s all in the players firmware.

 

 

if you are a “shuffle” type and don’t listen to albums/concerts you’ll never notice or really care about gapless.

but if you listen to albums and concerts, it                will                       annoy                you        sooner                                   or                                       later.

Doesn’t annoy me in the least and I never listen to single cuts.  I’m an old school music lover and always liked the concept of album “sides”.  So, if an album contains no breaks in the content and don’t want to hear any breaks in the music; I just simply rip the original CD accordingly…into 2 discrete tracks.  Since I never listen to a single cut of music, it very effectively solves the gap issue.

I know this concept wouldn’t work for everyone, but it’s a perfect solution for me.

Hmmmm… Album sides like the old days, I like it!

Not that the short gap bothers me all that much, but it would be be nice to hear some things straight through (Floyd etc)…

So how does one rip a cd as a single track? I’m a relative newb, I use Winamp to rip in Ogg.

I haven’t tried, but in theory you can just concatenate ogg files together to make a longer one.  In a linux shell the command would be like this:

cat track1.ogg track2.ogg track3.ogg > side1.ogg

I don’t know how you would do it in Windows. 

@sarsippius wrote:

Hmmmm… Album sides like the old days, I like it!

Not that the short gap bothers me all that much, but it would be be nice to hear some things straight through (Floyd etc)…

So how does one rip a cd as a single track? I’m a relative newb, I use Winamp to rip in Ogg.

 

I’m probably not the best person to ask, as I use my all-in-one restoration/ripping/encoding software to perform this task.  It’s a wonderful program; but probably not too many people would use such a powerful package to perform this pretty easy task.  The package I use is really geared at forensics (the FBI use the package I use); but since it can do almost anything in regards to an audio file, I find myself using it for almost everything.

I know many ripping programs give you the option to rip the entire CD as a single track; and from there you can use a wave editor to break that into the 2 album “sides”.