Gapless

[cai]

Is there any way to get MediaMonkey to play music truly gaplessly? I think it used to play gaplessly when I first installed it and before I added all my music, but using my full 12,000-odd track library, I almost always get a gap between tracks, sometimes several seconds in length depending on CPU usage. Meanwhile, Winamp plays gapless perfectly. I was wondering if using a different output plugin would make this possible but I've not found any. Any ideas?

[nohitter151]

Gapless playback works fine for me. Tell us your output plugin settings and perhaps we can offer additional tips.

[k]

I am using MM Directsound output plugin, enabled hardware acceleration, unchecked "remove silence" & "crossfade", checked all the "smooths". Using free version of 3.2.0 on Win7 64 (and previously in XP).

I am experiencing the same frustrations as every other person who posts asking about "gapless" mp3's (since 2006, no less - http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... ess#p64339)

The thing is, its just not consistent. From the 4-5 months I've been using MM, sometimes it'll play back an album correctly, sometimes not. My current thought is that it will play the gaps the first time, and then play gapless afterwards, but its hard to test for repeated behavior. That was my experience with the last mp3 album (off Amazon) that was suppose to play gaplessly.

But there is something definitely wrong with MM's gapless playback - all these mp3 albums played back great when I used winamp, and they play gaplessly in rockbox.

[GRW]

I have to admit, I play nearly all music with the crossfade on and I get songs fading into each other. Then one day, randomly, the songs will have a gap and crossfade will still be enabled. There would be no reason for it and only happens to me once in a while.

[nohitter151]

This is the crazy thing. You're asking how to make MM gapless. Meanwhile, there's another post here:
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... =1&t=51212

Saying that MM is gapless and they don't want it to be. Something's not right here

[Peke]

Nothing is crazy Smooth crossfade and control like http://www.winamp.com/plugin/sqrsoft-ad ... tput/32368 is the solution for everyone gapless issues no matter the choice.

Only thing I'm Missing in MM is better internal/Native Algorithm.

[k]

Just so we are all using the same terms, what we mean by "gapless" playback:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_pl ... _artifacts


crossfade, or adding a gap between songs, has nothing to do with it.

[nohitter151]

Just so we are all using the same terms, what we mean by "gapless" playback:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_pl ... _artifacts

It means so that the tracks play back as they would on the original CD, which is how it works for me.

[Peke]

@k
I'm not sure what you are wanted to say with that link. When I learned DJ-ing 20+ years ago gapless was always referenced as no gaps before new track start.

Please do not mix Gapless your ears hear and Gapless produced by removing digital silence (absolute silence) from track beginnings/ends.

Example If we have track with long/large Fadeout at the end. When new track start your brain will tell that last you heard before beginning was gap. Only solution for that is to use Fadein on next track to compensate fadeout. The actual process is now crossfading.

[k]

See, you're not understanding the problem. So, "gapless" meant "crossfade" 20 years ago. Now, it means "to play back an cd album ripped to mp3's without the gaps introduced by the crappy mp3 standard". Do the program creators get this? I see nohitter151 understands, and it works for him, but there are still several users it doesn't work for, hence all the forum posts complaining about it.

[rovingcowboy]

what you want is to have mediamonkey play gap at start of chapter one / song one and then not play any until end of book or end of album.

so that the songs that are to be played connected will be played connected like the steve miller band did on one of their albums.

and like they do with e books.

what is being told to you is that monkey can't do that because if you take the silent space out of the songs or book chapters it does not play any on the front and end of them.

so you need to use cross fading lever and adjust it for amount of time that equals the gaps if there is 2 seconds on front and end of the chapters or songs then you need to set it to 4 seconds so it will go to the next one with out the gap.
this how ever might do a little fade out and fade in.? not much but it could be enough to bother some people.

only way to get this without the use of crossfade is to edit said items in wav editor and merge them to one file. it will be long but that is what you want.
now audacity has this merge feature but it will merge them in one places if they all start at the same place in the time line.
so you need to do the copy and past for them, which means you need to put it on the end of the first file and keep going until you get to the end of the album or book.
then save it and export it to a new file.

lots of work and would be nice to have mediamonkey find the end of the one song / file and start of the next one and do the merge feature for you, but that would make monkey very bloated ware. so that is best done by an addon script.
not sure which script author is willing to take that on. but one might?

[YellowSoul]

Just so we are all using the same terms, what we mean by "gapless" playback:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_pl ... _artifacts

It means so that the tracks play back as they would on the original CD, which is how it works for me.

Still, there seem to be some people for whom it does not work, and no one knows why. Or did I miss something? Why can this be?
I personally would also be fine if all silence would be removed, including the intended silence that is played on a standalone cd player.
I am using MP3 files and mainly listen to concept albums where gapless playback is quite essential. I do not really know anything about different encoders. Maybe therein lies the problem.
My impression is that MediaMonkey first starts to load the next MP3 when the previous one has finished playing. And I also have the impression that MediaMonkey uses a lot of CPU during the two or so seconds of gap. It would be nice if this topic is addressed once again

[scoobydoo]

I've always found proper gapless playback my main problem with MediaMonkey. I've mucked around endlessly with output plugins and settings but the problem always persists. I'm not sure if there's a technical difficulty in getting it to work?
I still use MM for it's great tagging but after that it's on to JRiver Media Jukebox12 for playback. The same music files on the same external HD that stutter on MM play absolutely flawlessly in Media Jukebox, so it's got nothing to do with how the files are encoded....it's just that MM can't do gapless on my laptop

[rovingcowboy]

I've always found proper gapless playback my main problem with MediaMonkey. I've mucked around endlessly with output plugins and settings but the problem always persists. I'm not sure if there's a technical difficulty in getting it to work?
I still use MM for it's great tagging but after that it's on to JRiver Media Jukebox12 for playback. The same music files on the same external HD that stutter on MM play absolutely flawlessly in Media Jukebox, so it's got nothing to do with how the files are encoded....it's just that MM can't do gapless on my laptop

stutter is caused by overworked cpu's and lack of ram. plus on the laptops the extra issue of heat does this.

if your doing other things while trying to play monkey and all the scripts he has that you might have added then that will cause the cpu to get over worked. and possible cause more heat then can be or is wanted to be handled by the cpu.

monkey does a lot of things with songs while playing if you use other scripts. there is though some sort of trouble with some hardware as on some of my systems i can use wav output with buffers and on another i can't i have to use direct sound from monkey with out buffers. so its the chips and cpu that cause different errors.

that could be what happened to your laptop if the heat and the overworked cpu was not the errors.

[scoobydoo]

I've always found proper gapless playback my main problem with MediaMonkey. I've mucked around endlessly with output plugins and settings but the problem always persists. I'm not sure if there's a technical difficulty in getting it to work?
I still use MM for it's great tagging but after that it's on to JRiver Media Jukebox12 for playback. The same music files on the same external HD that stutter on MM play absolutely flawlessly in Media Jukebox, so it's got nothing to do with how the files are encoded....it's just that MM can't do gapless on my laptop

stutter is caused by overworked cpu's and lack of ram. plus on the laptops the extra issue of heat does this.

if your doing other things while trying to play monkey and all the scripts he has that you might have added then that will cause the cpu to get over worked. and possible cause more heat then can be or is wanted to be handled by the cpu.

monkey does a lot of things with songs while playing if you use other scripts. there is though some sort of trouble with some hardware as on some of my systems i can use wav output with buffers and on another i can't i have to use direct sound from monkey with out buffers. so its the chips and cpu that cause different errors.

that could be what happened to your laptop if the heat and the overworked cpu was not the errors.

Yup, you are right the CPU is maxed out for a short time...every time MM ends one song and starts another it seems to place an unusually high demand on the CPU. My point is that this NEVER happens with Media Jukebox... it just works. I've done the complete re-install and removal of scripts but no difference. Yes, WAV is a slight improvement as it doesn't give the stutters apart from song changes. Heat is def not a problem. I'm on Vista with 2gb RAM and I know most folk would say just shove in some extra RAM but at the end of the day it's only a music app I'm trying to run.. it ain't no HD film with 7 channel sound I'm trying to output. Media Jukebox perfectly running the same files, from the same external drive, with the same number of files in it's library (all with artwork showing etc) proves that my hardware is up to the job, it's just that MM is not capable of running smoothly on it