I’ve tested multiple albums in FLAC on the Clip+ that did not playback with flawless gapless. I’ve ripped securely with EAC, have verified gapless playback of these FLACs on my desktop with a media player known to support flawless gapless (Foobar2000), have loaded them onto my Clip+, and have heard digital distortion and clicks between the tracks. I’ve loaded the same FLACs onto my Cowon S9 (a player which supports gapless), and these FLACs have played back with flawless gapless (no gaps between tracks, no digital distortion or clicking between sound files as they segue between each other).
This isn’t a personal attack against any posters on this forum. I just find it counterproductive for users here to co-sign SanDisk’s failure to remedy this problem. This type of behavior, in my opinion, does not encourage SanDisk to fix a problem that they are failing to acknoweldge.
It’s not a perfect analogy, because people’s personal safety and lives do not hinge upon gapless playback on the Clip+, but say for example, a car company advertises anti-lock brakes and lists in the car manual that the car a person purchased has anti-lock brakes. Then when the customer applies brakes, and they lock, they are upset.
They discuss this issue with other customers on the company’s webforum, and many other customers confirm that the brakes lock on this particular model. Then, other customers start talking about how the brakes only lock sometimes, when they do lock, it’s not as bad as how other cars’ brakes lock, some users don’t notice them locking, or that they notice that the brakes do lock, but it doesn’t really bother them all that much.
Bottom line is that the company continues to state that their car has anti-lock brakes, which I take to mean that the brakes should not lock period, no matter who is driving the car.
The accepted definition of “gapless playback” among audio users for whom “gapless playback” matters is that audio files play one after another without a gap between the files, without a digital click or distortion between the files, and most importantly, when playing back an album in which each song flows into the next song without a break of silence, perceptually, it sounds like one perfect transition of uninterupted flow from one song to the next (the most popular example of this is Pink Floy’d Dark Side Of The Moon).
I have searched multiple forums, and this statement by Marvin that he found one album that did playback gaplessly in FLAC is the first statement of a user that I have seen in which someone verified that the Clip+ does playback with flawless gapless. In every other instance of a claim of gapless playback on the Clip+, when the user was challenged and went back and listened a second time, the user came back to the forum and admitted that there was at least a little bit of a click between tracks when playing back the kind of album in which each song is supposed to flow into the next one seemlessly (like in Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon).
From my perspective, the bottom line is that “gapless playback” on the Clip+ as advertised by SanDisk and as listed in their manual means that all playback on the Clip+ should be gapless for any sound files and for all users under all circumstances, not just for the one album out of thousands that one user out of thousands reports worked in FLAC and then promptly deleted from that user’s Clip+.
This isn’t intended to turn into a flame thread. I’m trying to keep the constructive criticism of SanDisk’s failure to correct the “gapless playback” problems on the Clip+ going.
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Marvin_Martian wrote:
I’ve just listened to a FLAC album that played gapless. I won’t keep the FLAC on this player, but I wanted to see if it worked.
Message Edited by richter on 02-15-2010 11:05 AM