Gapless / Non-Gapless playback behaviour

[JimX]

Gapless playback is very important to me. Many of the albums I play in MediaMonkey are DJ mixes or live sets where gapless playback is what is wanted, but others are regular albums where a couple seconds of silence between tracks is preferable. Standalone CD players deal with gapless playback of CD audio files without difficulty - tracks where a pause is wanted have a couple of seconds of silence tacked on the beginning and/or end; if there's no silence, the next track plays immediately without any noticeable gap.

It seems to be difficult to achieve this with software players and digital audio files like mp3s for some reason. Like many other major players, MM can't play the two-second pause on tracks that have them without also creating a tiny but noticeable "seam" between tracks that don't have the silence (a very slight pause, hesitation, click, skip or whatever).

I'm currently achieving the gapless playback by tweaking the DirectSound plugin as explained here:
http://www.mediamonkey.com/faq/index.ph ... ht=gapless

This method works very well at reducing the "seam" to nothing, but at the cost of taking out all silence at the beginning and end of tracks that should have it. The result is that live mixes play great, but albums where a brief silence between tracks is preferable have no silence. The effect is almost as jarring in some cases as it is in live mixes when a gap appears.

My wish would be for a gapless playback that emulates standalone CD player behaviour, where playback is seamless for continuous mixes and has silence between tracks where you would hear silence on the CD. If this is truly impossible in a software audio player (and I don't think it is, since iTunes behaves like a standalone CD player out of the box), then I would like to be able to choose between gapless playback (as configured in DirectSound) and non-gapless more easily - ideally by being able to set gapless or non-gapless as a parameter on an album by album basis, or with a simple toggle switch in the main interface.

I originally posted this as a request for help scripting the toggle, but it now seems more likely that this would be a change the developers would have to implement.

Any of the following would make me extremely happy (I'm already extremely happy with MM Gold, but no reason not to be happier):

1.
Make the next version of MediaMonkey behave like iTunes and standalone CD players when it comes to gapless playback.

2.
Add scripting objects (requested by others for other reasons) so that one's scripts can do "hot" resets of the program (rewrite INI file, re-read INI file, re-initialize plugin without restarting MM).

3.
Add scripting objects that give access to whatever program components are affected when one tweaks DirectSound's setting manually through the Options panel.

4.
Add "presets" to Options panel and then allow these to be set for albums, songs, or whatever in the library.

I love MediaMonkey and will continue to use it, but this is a serious drawback of the program for me, and one that must be important to many other users, especially those interested in DJ and producer music, where having to choose between always a seam or never a seam is a real aesthetic dilemma.

Thank you!

[geek]

Ditto from a huge MM fan ... gapless playback is essential for certain albums and pieces.

[jiri]

MM 3.0 has some improvements in this area (at least an easy switch between crossfading and gapless playback). When a beta version is out (hopefully quite soon), please check it out and report back if you think anything else could be improved.

Jiri

[JimX]

Thanks, Jiri! That's great.

I'll look forward to the beta!

[zomf]

MM 3.0 has some improvements in this area (at least an easy switch between crossfading and gapless playback). When a beta version is out (hopefully quite soon), please check it out and report back if you think anything else could be improved.

Jiri

I'm still looking for gapless playback for the same reasons JimX stated. I've tried turning off cross fading, but that causes an abrubt transistion that catches my attention every song when listing to continuous mix albums. Cross fading will only go down to .5 seconds, which is still noticable (I can hear the drums trip up).

My expectation is that I can't tell when one track ends and the next begins.

[nohitter151]

Gapless playback works fine for me if crossfade is disabled with the default MM plugins on LAME encoded mp3 files as well as for flac files.

[rovingcowboy]

trip up of the drums could be showing you that there is too small of system L2 catch setting. or too small of a page file setting.

might also be caused by your buffer setting, you have windows media player in your system? if not then add wmp 11 or newer. go to its options and use the direct sound plug in that it has to set the buffer settings. this might help with the MMdirect sound plug in.

also might just be you need to get the directx updated on your system. they just released new update for directx back about 2 weeks ago. you should look for it on microsoft.com/downloads.

[adchez]

Okay everybody. I've figured it out. Gapless playback in MediaMonkey.

Tools > Options > Input Plugins

Select 'Monkey's Audio Player' v3.99 > Configure > Supress long passages of silence > Save > Ok

Done

[adchez]

There's always another way. lol

[Eyal]

Okay everybody. I've figured it out. Gapless playback in MediaMonkey.

Tools > Options > Input Plugins

Select 'Monkey's Audio Player' v3.99 > Configure > Supress long passages of silence > Save > Ok

Done

True, but only for .APE files. Monkey's Audio Player refers to this lossless codec format: http://www.monkeysaudio.com
Do not confuse with MediaMonkey.

[SimonORorke]

I would like the opposite: an option for MediaMonkey to insert a standard gap of a specified number of seconds of silence between tracks played. I expect that such a feature would be popular amongst many listeners to genres such as classical and avant-garde, though perhaps of no interest to most listeners to genres such as dance, pop and rock.

[SimonORorke]

Actually I have just noticed that there is an add-on to insert a standard gap of a specified number of seconds of silence between tracks played: Silence Between Songs http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... =2&t=42775. I will try it out. But I still think this should be a standard option of MediaMonkey.

[ryanryanryan]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE



we need gapless playback!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


if iTunes has it working so should MM!

[nohitter151]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE



we need gapless playback!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MM already has this.

[silver180]

No it doesn't. Just jiggered the thing 8 wasy from Sunday and I can reduce the gap on classical recordings, but IT IS NOT SEAMLESS.