What is Gapless Playback. ??

[divad6719]

I'm maybe about to be embarassed here but could someone explain what gapless playback is and why it is so important to so many ?.

I like to consider myself proficient enough in the encoding world to fulfill my own requirments, but I just don't know what this means (it's never really sparked my interest up until now).

I would imagine that it is pretty simple, Gapless=No Gaps
but a brief explanation would be appreciated from someone with a bit more knowledge.

Cheers

[jeff]

Non-Gapless...

You're listening to your favorite "live" concert recording, the first song ends and your anxiously awaiting your favorite singer to welcome the crowd of 50,000 and..... there's a pause so that your player can move the next song

In a Gapless environment there is not even a millisecond pause between songs, everything flows from start to finish.

[divad6719]

Aaahhh, the penny drops

Thanks for that great explanation jeff.

Cheers

[sweetspot]

Moreover, (not that Jeffs explaination wasn't good enough..just another example) every CD you own incorporates this blending feature . The best example of this would be most widely heard in Classical music CD's. Certain pieces of music are written in movements (parts to be plain) and even though the movements may be seen as individual tracks on the CD cover, when you listen to the pieces, they usually transition into each other without you even noticing that you're listening to a new movement.

That's another huge reason I want my gapless playback.

Another example: Ever listen to any Pink Floyd ? Alot of their songs are meant to stream/flow into each other. Any amount of gap time between them just makes the transition extremely unnatural and ruins the mood/moment. Believe that.

Then there's DJ mixes and other bands who record their songs with the intent of having them all flow into one another, in order to tell some sort of story.

Then there's what Jeff said...I myself have many concerts. They are all in Ogg format because of this. So as you can see, and hopefully Iriver too....this isn't just a trivial matter, such as wanting a freekin' calander or something.

[gdog]

I didn't think I'd be concerned about this until I started listening to my Enigma CDs, and Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon"...

Could this be fixed at some point with a firmware update? If so wouldn't it also have to addressed at the encoding level?

Thanks,

gdog

[sweetspot]

The Rio Karma already employs gapless. It's not rocket science. The IHP is more than capable with it's 32 MB buffer. As far as being addressed at the encoding level goes, Ogg isn't just a good format because it sounds better at lower bitrates. In fact, that's only one of the pluses it offers. The other stuff is that it's also a multi-channel codec, meaning it can do independent channels without extra processing devices. I believe over 100 channels seperately. Also, it does gapless natively, so nothing else needs to be tweaked. This was it's biggest selling point when it came out IMO, and why so many people want to see it succeed. Of course, there's the whole "free" thing too. Gee, wonder why major Co's don't want to deal with it eh ? HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM... .Rat ass greedy pigs.

[SickTwist]

I may be wrong but I think I read somewhere that because of the way the MP3 format stores audio data it isn't possible for MP3s to be truly gapless. MP3 files are divided up into small chunks of data. If the song isn't long enough to fill the last chunk up completely then the encoder uses silence to fill it out rather than just make the last chunk shorter. Ogg Vorbis & FLAC use a compression method that works differently and they can both offer true gapless.

This isn't to say that the iHP firmware couldn't be designed to remove the trailing silence on MP3s. My point is MP3s offer a greater challenge because they don't natively support gapless. Therefore it probably isn't the best solution to encode gapless albums in MP3 format.

If I've misunderstood the way MP3 works please correct

[gdog]

So I guess the answer to whether or not it also needs to be addressed (supported) at the encoding level is yes. If so, is OGG the only codec that can?

Thanks,

gdog

[rob13800]

...just seems kinda odd that you didnt know...i mean you have like 177 posts