Clementine
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clementine-player
Gapless still not perfect in 1.2
From [email protected] on October 30, 2013 19:12:49
What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Add songs to playlist that should be gapless (second half of Abby Road for example) 2. Play songs 3. Notice a split second gap between tracks What is the expected output? What do you see instead? tracks should play back to back with no gaps at all. The current behavior is better than previous versions, but is still not the behavior expected (playback from a CD would not have any gaps at all, that's what I would like to see) What version of the product are you using? On what operating system? Clementine 1.2 on Linux (arch) Please provide any additional information below. There is already an open issue for this, however it is restricted to MP3 files (I have noticed it with m4a and flac as well) and I cannot comment on it due to not having commit permissions.
Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/clementine-player/issues/detail?id=3933
From [email protected] on November 21, 2013 11:19:56
I have the same problem too, I tested with some mp3 songs that should be gapless and i have the gapp Tested on Clementine 1.2 on Windows 8.1 (x64)
From [email protected] on December 04, 2013 08:21:56
What formats do you listen to?
As far as I can see, the problem lies with Gstreamer which is not gapless for all formats. I checked gapless playback for various formats and: it is gapless for wav, flac, ape, wavpack, ogg, opus, ALAC (m4a) but it is not gapless for mp3 and AAC (m4a).
So I am surprised that Benjamin found problems with gapless also for flac. What sort of m4a did you try? Apple Lossless (ALAC), or AAC (lossy)?
From [email protected] on December 04, 2013 08:28:48
To comment #3
I think this is a Gstreamer issue, because I encountered the same behaviour with Amarok using the Gstreamer backend (with the Xine backend Amarok was never gapless for any format). It was gapless for the formats for which Clementine is also gapless, but it was not gapless for the same formats: mp3 and AAC (m4a).
If Clementine has the implementation of gapless playback from Amarok - i.e if the code is basically the same - then this implementation might be faulty, but if Clementine's implementation of gapless is independent of Amarok, then the issue is likely to be with Gstreamer.
From [email protected] on December 04, 2013 12:52:13
Now I tested with gst-play-1.0 the various formats (gst-play-1.0 --gapless file1 file2), and found that Gstreamer is NOT gapless for mp3 and m4a (AAC), whereas it is gapless for wav, flac, ape, wavpack, alac, ogg and opus.
So unless Gstreamer fixes this issue, Clementine will never be gapless for mp3 and m4a (AAC).
I don't believe this depends on gstreamer. Exaile uses gstreamer for playback and handles gapless flac just fine, while Clementine 1.2.1 does not.
I just ran a few more tests with Exaile 3.3.2. It plays .mp3 and .m4a files with a gap, but plays .flac with no gap. So, at least for .flac, Clementine should be able to achieve gapless. (I'm using the ALSA audio sink in both programs.)
Is this relevant? GStreamer 1.6 just came out a few weeks ago.
https://coaxion.net/blog/2014/08/concatenate-multiple-streams-gaplessly-with-gstreamer/
Quick bump to say this problem also/still exists in version 1.3.1 on macOS.
While I'm there, huge thanks for your work on Clementine, which allows me to basically never launch the calamity that is iTunes 😁
Still an issue in 1.4 rc2 (this is on Arch Linux).
Actually, there may be a workaround which works on some setups (noticed this on a very old thread on Arch forums, but it still works). Per default the buffer size in Clementine is 4000ms. Setting this to 1000ms, I do not get audible pauses anymore. I still get them if I forward to near the end of a track (say, less than 3s to the end; I'm not sure on the limit); but more than that, the gap goes away. I've tested this on OGG Vorbis files and FLACs.
This does not mean that Clementine actually does gapless playback correctly. Also, there still might be a small gap (but I just do not hear it). Also, this might break on some esoteric CDs with very short tracks.
IMHO the goal should be to be able to produce a CD as it was originally mastered (no crossfade, no gaps between tracks), on file formats which do not introduce gaps themself. As a further step workarounds for more broken formats could be added (mp3, aac...).
But I can see this might not be a priority. Most users will not notice / don't care (also judging from the fact, the last comment on this bug report was 5 years ago!).
Cheers! And thanks for this wonderful audio player ;-)
