@coreying wrote:
@marvin_martian wrote:
@coreying wrote:
So with this “gapless playback” support - what are the conditions?
i.e. Will it work with my LAME encoded MP3’s which playback gapless on my Rockbox enabled iRiver H140 and Winamp etc?
(I don’t have a Clip+, but I’m sure I’ve seen people say that gapless support on the clip+ does NOT include MP3s)
With the Clip+, the “gapless” is very close, but not quite perfect. Going through a variety of LAME mp3 albums of mine, there were a couple albums that were perfectly seamless in their track transitions, and a couple albums where sometimes there would be a very faint click that you would hear. Most people might not even hear it…but if you are used to Rockbox-type seamlessness, the Clip+ isn’t quite there.
As far as the Fuze+, who knows?
Thanks for your response Marvin. I have just borrowed my friend’s Clip+ to test this out and for the most part the gapless playback with my LAME encoded MP3’s works fine, and there is no click either!
However, the method that Sansa are using to perform the gapless playback appears to be the “read ahead and listen for silence at the end and start of tracks and then remove that” rather than the “read the gapless information from the LAME encoding and process the files based on that” methods. What this means is that where there is music playing at the very end and very start of the song, the gapless is working perfectly. But where you have a song with a moment silence at the end or start of the song, but no “gap” (as silence is not necessarily a gap!), then the silence is also removed, mucking up the timing of the silence.
An example of this would be the “Dream Theater - Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes From A Memory” album.
At the end of track 2 (Overture 1928) is a series snare hits in time with the guitars and bass, with pauses in between the groups of hits. The track transition occurs during one of the pauses in the groups of snare hits (~0.75 second at end of track 2 and ~0.25 at start of track 3), but the pause is cut out by the method of “gap skip” which Sansa are using.
Still, this is a far rarer occurrence in music than continual sound between tracks, so I can live with this fault
I ended up deciding it was good enough, for a good long while…because as you saw, it’s pretty close. But I ended up Rockboxing my old Clip+ after I got my second one, and liked it so much that I did it to the other one too.
But as far as the Fuze+, I can’t answer if it will be handled the same way as the Clip+ or not…and with the new touch controls on it, I don’t anticipate myself getting one, either. I already had a player with controls that worked that way, and unless I was standing or sitting still, the controls were a pain the the butt.
