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Heads up: Chromecast Audio supports gapless playback!

windhoek

windhoek

The Phoolosopher
One of the key missing jigsaw pieces in my streaming setup is finally missing no more: Chromecast Audio supports gapless playback, and apparently, it has done for time!

The solution is simple: initiate casting via the Google Home app first then open your media player and play music - it's that simple! For years I've been using the PLEX app to cast to my CCA and for years (or for some time at least) I've been missing out on gapless playback.

I've tested this with PLEX and Poweramp and both options work fine. I should add, I ran into problems when I tried using an old Android device whereby the Google Home app is limited to an old, unsupported version (version 2.29.1.7); the version on my other Android device (version 2.32.1.5) works perfectly.

I can't seem to be able to achieve gapless playback it from my Macbook Air, and I haven't tried to achieve it from a Windows platform.

Fwiw, I've read lots and lots of pages on the web over the years hoping to find a solution to get gapless playback on my CCA but the post I read this morning is the first and only one I've ever come across stating that CCA does support gapless playback (without having to utilise third-party workarounds) and that this is the way to do it.

Well done, Xanthe, over at Naim Forums for figuring it out and lfor etting the people know how to do it (the post was actually from October last year)!
 
Never had a problem with CCA and gapless, worked straight out of the box as far as I can remember.......
 
mr sneff said:
Never had a problem with CCA and gapless, worked straight out of the box as far as I can remember.......
Click to expand...

Fascinating! What were your playback sources and players? Fwiw, I've no idea whether the CCA could or did do gapless with cloud streaming. But gapless playback of local files was something I could never achieve before - and neither could a lot of other people if the numerous posts on the web are anything to go by. But of course, it might well be that I was simply late to the party in finding out that local files could play gapless as long as you initialise casting via Google's app as opposed to your preferred player's casting icon.
 
Damn, I spoke too soon. It would seem that the gapless aspect of playback is done by the Google Home app and not the CCA itself - I confirmed this by streaming music from my PLEX server and then casting it to the CCA, but when I turned off my wifi on my phone, audio playback stopped instantly. Conversely, casting via the PLEX app allows me to turn off my phone's wifi once a casting connection has been made between CCA and my PLEX server, whereby my phone is no longer needed for playback to continue.

It seems then, that whether the CCA can do gapless playback isn't something I can say is currently possible. While the Google Home app is, I suppose, a first-party workaround, it's a workaround nonetheless, sadly. I may use the Google Home app for playing albums that really need to be heard as one, as it were. But other than that, I'll just stick to using my PLEX app to create the casting connection.

Close...
 
It just irritates me a little that you now seem to have to sign in with a Google account these days in order to use a Chromecast...
 
Landed another NOS CCA for under twenty notes recently and set it up in the bedroom system.
"Songs while I make pongs", sounds fine from the en-suite :rolleyes:
 
Well, well, well. I just listened to an album via my CCA for the first time in ages there and it played gapless! I was using Poweramp on my ZTE Android phone and gapless playback just happened all by itself. It never used to do that, that's for sure. I was actually just testing things out as I had to faff about in the settings to stop the app from going to sleep, or rather, to make sure the app kept on casting as it had stopped after about 20 minutes or so. Anyway, I fixed the sleep issue wrt casting and it was after that when I played something else that I noticed that the album I casted played gapless. I confirmed this with a few live concert albums and sure enough, they played gapless as well. Result!
 
I'm currently using my Android device to cast hi-res audio (24/88.2) to my CCA via USB Audio Player Pro and sure enough, I'm still getting gapless playback; what's more, the bitrate LED on my DAC says it's receiving 88.2 via Optical In so gapless hi-res playback confirmed.

Fwiw, casting keeps on stopping after 20-30 minutes when I'm using Poweramp and for the life of me, I can't figure out the setting that needs activated/de-activated to fix it. I've read posts about it all over the web but I just can't figure it out. I'm now playing a second album via USB Audio Player Pro and I'm pleased to say casting playback has been flawless so far, with no brief drop outs as sometimes happens with Poweramp.
 
FFS, the bugs are back!

I might well be getting gapless playback when casting from my Android device running USB Audio Player Pro, but now that app is dropping connection sometimes as well. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Fwiw, I'm not talking about brief drop outs, I mean connection compltely cuts out and the app needs to be closed and started again. It was the issue of gapless playback and connection reliability that made me buy a Bluesound Node 2i a year or two ago and now that I've got a banging bedroom system, I'm beginning to think I might just have to buy another one for this system as well.

The Bluesound might cost a whole lot more than my CCA did but it does gapless as standard and playback is rock solid so unless I can figure out what's going on when it comes to getting reliable and gapless playback when I'm casting to my CCA, then I'm probably gonna have to bite the bullet and buy another Bluesound as it just works. FFS!

EDIT: I've just downloaded Foobar2000 and if that doesn't work then I'm just gonna have to buy another Bluesound as the bugs are driving me to frustration.
 
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