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Gapless playback?

cctaylor

cctaylor

pfm Member
I am still to be convinced that gapless playback is a good idea.

I now understand that what I perceived as strange behaviour streaming Dark Side of the Moon was just gapless playback of the remastered version. Maybe I'm a flat earther, but certainly I don't like gapless on DSOTM, the tracks don't flow together properly, I find the transitions jarring.

Anybody else with me on this?
 
Gapless is gapless I suspect you have a setup issue happening maybe?

DSOTM streaming should play exactly like a vinyl copy, if you listen to any live music gapless is an absolute must. If there is a gap there is no flow...
 
narabdela said:
I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, but I've never understood why people get their knickers so twisted by the lack of it. It doesn't bother me either way.
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Not to dispute your view but to me the capability to achieve gapless playback when it's intended is very important indeed.

JS Bach composed the Goldberg Variations so that quite a few were to be played continuously with no intervening gap. It jars my experience when an audio player cannot handle this, even if the interruption is quite short. And in operas like Das Rheingold the tracks frequently run naturally into each other, as intended.

When I ripped operas like this some time ago for a DAP which couldn't play tracks continuously I had to use an audio editor to stitch together the tracks for each compete scene to preserve both what the composer intended and what my ears expected.
 
narabdela said:
I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, but I've never understood why people get their knickers so twisted by the lack of it. It doesn't bother me either way.
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If you're a Pink Floyd fan you'd miss the seamless transition between tracks which is essential for the music.
 
cctaylor said:
I am still to be convinced that gapless playback is a good idea.

I now understand that what I perceived as strange behaviour streaming Dark Side of the Moon was just gapless playback of the remastered version. Maybe I'm a flat earther, but certainly I don't like gapless on DSOTM, the tracks don't flow together properly, I find the transitions jarring.

Anybody else with me on this?
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Is it me or does none of the above make any sense?
 
Bangaio said:
Nope makes no sense to me it is almost like the OP thinks that playback with gaps is gapleaa. Maybe they have a cross fade set up rather than gapless.
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This sounds likely. Gapless should sound just like playing a CD. I suspect that the confusion as to what gapless entails might be because it's so common these days that some might not have experienced the annoying, fraction of a second delay that would be evident on a DAP made 10-15 years ago between tracks that were joined seamlessly on CD.
 
I'm going to have a listen to my vinyl DSOTM tonight and compare it to the the streamed re-mastered version.

It seems that my understanding of gapless may be wrong, but the track changes on DSOTM sounded odd to me the other night.
 
For classical music gapless playback is a non-negotiable necessity. A choral work or opera may have 100 “tracks” but should play continuously without any gaps, except perhaps between the acts in an opera. Such works are split into “tracks” only to aid navigation.
 
AndyU said:
For classical music gapless playback is a non-negotiable necessity. A choral work or opera may have 100 “tracks” but should play continuously without any gaps, except perhaps between the acts in an opera. Such works are split into “tracks” only to aid navigation.
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Indeed. FWIW years ago when CD was fairly new the first cd ripping software and drive I used had the daft habit of treating all audio discs as if the 2 sec nominal lead in was a gap and added it. The result was rips that were useless for classical music, and based on a misunderstanding of the Audio CD Red Book! Fortunately the world was young enough that I could contact the programmer and get him to fix it.
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
Indeed. FWIW years ago when CD was fairly new the first cd ripping software and drive I used had the daft habit of treating all audio discs as if the 2 sec nominal lead in was a gap and added it. The result was rips that were useless for classical music, and based on a misunderstanding of the Audio CD Red Book! Fortunately the world was young enough that I could contact the programmer and get him to fix it.
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An alternative to ripping a cd or boxed set into separate tracks is/was to rip it into one file and use a separate cue sheet file to navigate and identify the tracks, but this strategy has fallen out of favour. Nonetheless ripping software like dbpoweramp and music players like JRiver support it. If people use a music player that doesn’t support gapless playback nothing stopping them re-ripping the cd as one rip, or using something like DBpoweramp to stitch the tracks back together.
 
FWIW I do tend to use a mix of 'rip each track to its own file' and 'rip a series of tracks to one file' depending on the nature of the work. The problem I referred to actually added gaps when I did the second! Fortunately, now a 'feature' of a past age of software!
 
After some experimentation and reading the comments above. I have come to the conclusion that I had the completely wrong idea of how gapless was meant to work.

Gapless is definitely a good idea when it is intended to be played that way.

The issues I had were being caused by gaps rather than no gaps. I have now managed to get gapless working properly in Bubbleupnp and am totally happy with the result. At first I thought the problem was the Yamaha WXAD-10. Once I had the Yamaha fed Qobuz through LMS from my PC I found it could play gapless. I found a setting in Bubbleupnp to enable gapless

Thanks everyone for humouring me. Streaming has been a bit of a learning curve but I am getting there
 
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