Gapless playback in Ubuntu?

[joris1977]

Not really, in that it will not serve music to a remote player.

True, but if you let mpd stream to an icecast2 server, you can listen to your music with any remote player that can handle shoutcast To control your music you can easily use mpd over ssh...

[vanadium]

Yes, if you let ... I just wanted to clarify that in its own, mpd is not a music server.

You can control mpd with an ssh prompt, but you can also control it with any mpd client over the network, for which it is designed.

[amano]

What is the current state here?

Quod Libet has gapless playback for flac and ogg now (the version in Karmic?) but is still missing support for lame info tag MP3s?


And Audacious has support for gapless lame files?

[cascade9]

Amarok 1.4.0+ and Exaile 0.3.0+, XMMS2 and Jajuk are meant to support gapless playback as well. But I'm not sure if thats ogg/flac only, or mp3 as well.

Options are still very limited for gapless playback of mp3 (properly ripped and lame encoded). mp3 might still constitute the majority of your collection because it is the only format supported by any digital audio player.

The only true gapless playback option for lame that I know is music player daemon (mpd). It is what I use. mpd is a "server" and you control it with a client of choice, command line (mpc), norton commander like (ncmpc), full fledged graphical (sonata, gmpc, ...), or through a web interface in your browser. Only drawback: somewhat more difficult to set up.

True. Pity that there is less ogg and flac support for protable devices, or the other OSes stupid media players (iTunes, WMP). While I dont like the lack of support from Apple and Microsoft, its understandable, they are pushing thier own 'audio solutions'- WMA and M4A/AAC vs Ogg Vorbis, and WMA-'lossless' and ALAC vs Flac.

[hugmenot]

What is the current state here?

Quod Libet has gapless playback for flac and ogg now (the version in Karmic?) but is still missing support for lame info tag MP3s?

Actually not yet. Quod Libet devs merged the gapless patches into the main branch recently, but no release including gapless has been made yet. On the upside you can look forward to perfect gapless for all formats, including LAME header based, once this release is made. I can offer to upload a package to a PPA once it is out. It already works well here, but I run from a development snapshot.

[amano]

thanks hugmenot

From what my testing today showed:

NOT:
- Exaile 0.3 from the Karmic repos is NOT gapless for my flac files. Is it for anyone? I switched to the unified plugin, turned on the crossfader and set the crossfading time to zero.
-Banshee will be gapless, once this branch is merged: http://gitorious.com/~raof/banshee/gapless-work There doesn't seem to be too much activity in there though...
- Audacious wasn't gapless for me by default. I wanted to turn the crossfader plugin on, but that isn't shipped by default? It is even not in the Karmic repos?


WORKING: Rhythmbox is gapless, though not for MP3. I hope that will be tackled soon.

FUTURE: While the current Quod Libet doesn't offer any gapless currently, it seems to be our best bet to do so soon (if hugmenot is hopefully right).

NOT tested: Aqualung is probably gapless but overall it is a PITA usability wise.

Any comments?

[cascade9]

Experimental support for gapless (must be enabled in prefs)

http://www.exaile.org/

I'm not sure where you turn on gapless, and being experimental it might not work. I thought I had seen a post on hydrogen audio saying that someone had got gapless going fine with exaile 0.3.0, but I could be wrong.

I really hope that the exaile devs dont think that crossfading = gapless.....

I would test it myself, but I'm using foobar2000 as my main audio player, and besides that...I only have exaile 0.2.11 (guess what distro that is LMAO)

[lazka]

FUTURE: While the current Quod Libet doesn't offer any gapless currently, it seems to be our best bet to do so soon (if hugmenot is hopefully right).

You can use my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~lazka/+archive/dumpingplace/

[reacocard]

On Exaile, Unified with crossfade disabled is gapless, with crossfade enabled is NOT. There's just no toggle explicitly saying its gapless because it's inherent in the Unified engine.

[amano]

From what I can tell the latest Audacious 2.3 should support gapless MP3 support (even with the default input and output plugins).

At least my own test files seem to work. I am hunting down a few of really demanding samples to test it out, but the files from the hydrogenaudio wiki seem to have vanished.

EDIT: I traced down the files in the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...e_of_right.zip Those are wavepack files and are completely gapless with rhytmbox and audacious. I have to transcode them to mp3 files to check if the decoder can handle the lame information in the lame info tag.