Media Player that will do Gapless Playback

[Guest hp1]

Just wondering if anyone has come across a media player for android that can handle gapless playback of mp3 files. I listen to loads of DJ compilations which just sound awful on the Heros native player due to the small gap inserted evertime a track changes. I've had a google but it doesnt look too promising.

cheers

[Guest stevenz]

Just wondering if anyone has come across a media player for android that can handle gapless playback of mp3 files. I listen to loads of DJ compilations which just sound awful on the Heros native player due to the small gap inserted evertime a track changes. I've had a google but it doesnt look too promising.

cheers

Haven't checked myself, but have you tried Meridian? (Not that I want to encourage DJ music... ;))

[Guest hp1]

Haven't checked myself, but have you tried Meridian? (Not that I want to encourage DJ music... ;))

I have now, no luck ;) Guess I'll have to stick to old fashioned rock albums till android figure this one out.

Edited December 13, 2009 by hp1

[Guest Webreaper]

I have now, no luck :P Guess I'll have to stick to old fashioned rock albums till android figure this one out.

This is really frustrating. It's not rocket science, and stops my N1 being a decent MP3 player. :(

You could do worse than add your support to: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3461

[Guest hp1]

Wow! Even with 2.1 google havent fixed this! How can we possibly hold our Android devices up proudly when this basic functionality is missing, its the one thing that i'm embarrased to admit to iphone users. C'mon google!

[Guest]

It is a bit crazy indeed.

[Guest JadeMonkee]

Yeah. I'm REALLY disappointed with the music playback in Android.

Seriously needs some work.

[Guest qpop]

Yeah. I'm REALLY disappointed with the music playback in Android.

Seriously needs some work.

In fairness to Google Apple had years of experience in audio and still don't get it right.

eg. "equaliser" functions on iPods etc make very little difference, and are more distortion than anything. or the fact that I believe even by third generation ipods they hadn't mastered gapless playback.

Have some patience guys!

[Guest cybrian]

In fairness to Google Apple had years of experience in audio and still don't get it right.

eg. "equaliser" functions on iPods etc make very little difference, and are more distortion than anything. or the fact that I believe even by third generation ipods they hadn't mastered gapless playback.

Have some patience guys!

Gapless playback doesn't take much; every decent desktop audio player has it, and from what I understand the iPod 5G (first with video) is the first iPod that does gapless, and since then every other iPod has supported gapless playback just fine.

I almost want to bring my iPod touch with me everywhere just so I have a decent MP3 player.

[Guest]

In fairness to Google Apple had years of experience in audio and still don't get it right.

eg. "equaliser" functions on iPods etc make very little difference, and are more distortion than anything. or the fact that I believe even by third generation ipods they hadn't mastered gapless playback.

Have some patience guys!

Are you suggesting that we need to go through X number of iterations of product to get Gapless playback just because Apple did? How long were televisions black and white? Should the screens on our phones be black and white for 20 years just because Brand Y didn't make a colour screen for that length of time?

[Guest sambartle]

To be fair to android in general.. the MP3 spec doesnt actually support gapless.. anything that does gapless on MP3's is doing it by faking it.. (which I suppose technically means android is doing it right and other players are wrong - but as someone who needs gapless for almost all the albums I listen too i agree its annoying that android doesnt bodge it.)

Edited April 12, 2010 by sambartle

[Guest stevenz]

Perhaps Coreplayer will support gapless when it turns up. Even WinAmp took quite a while before they got gapless playback working correctly, as sambartle says, it's a hack as software has to detect the actual endpoint of the audio in the MP3 as it's often not at the actual end of the file. I'd imagine that it's something they'll put into FroYo (2.5) as the newer devices have the spare CPU cycles to do this kind of (albeit reasonably menial) extra work. The media player is one of the biggest shortcomings in Android, but they have said that it's something they're working on fairly heavily.

I

[Guest Musicexplorer]

The new version of museek (0.957) in the android market features (optional) gapless playback. Just enable it in the settings and adjust the value of the gap (device dependent). If you encounter any problems visit museek.ethz.ch or send an email to the developers.

Perhaps Coreplayer will support gapless when it turns up. Even WinAmp took quite a while before they got gapless playback working correctly, as sambartle says, it's a hack as software has to detect the actual endpoint of the audio in the MP3 as it's often not at the actual end of the file. I'd imagine that it's something they'll put into FroYo (2.5) as the newer devices have the spare CPU cycles to do this kind of (albeit reasonably menial) extra work. The media player is one of the biggest shortcomings in Android, but they have said that it's something they're working on fairly heavily.

I

[Guest hp1]

Good call @musicexplorer

Mmm interesting, had avery quick play, this is a clunky way of doing it becuase you have to manually enter the amount of time you want to remove to the nearest millisecond. Its gonna take quite a bit of trial and error (especially with DJ Mixes) to get this spot on. The default of 1000ms is too long. I'll have more of play tonight with a few mixes and see if I can dial it in.

Edited May 5, 2010 by hp1

[Guest thephreak]

I found a solution / work around for this problem.

i just downloaded an album and it was in .ogg format didn't know if android supported it so i just tried the play the music and it did. so i was listening to the music when i realized i was at track 6 and en never heard a pause between the songs.

so i skipped to the last part of the song to check if i was right and i was.

so you can plackback music gapless but you have to convert your mp3's to ogg files.

[Guest sambartle]

I found a solution / work around for this problem.

i just downloaded an album and it was in .ogg format didn't know if android supported it so i just tried the play the music and it did. so i was listening to the music when i realized i was at track 6 and en never heard a pause between the songs.

so i skipped to the last part of the song to check if i was right and i was.

so you can plackback music gapless but you have to convert your mp3's to ogg files.

That wont actually work properly.. MP3s have silence encoded into the end of the track because MP3s HAVE to be a certain frame size.. if there are less samples they are padded with silence to the required amount.. so converting an MP3 to an Ogg wont actually help (youd still get the silence.. as you cant just drop it.. in case it was intended to be there - although some encoders do, although this is also wrong)

Converting the original recording from CD to ogg would work properly (ogg's dont have to have each frame a certain size and so dont suffer this problem)

The exception is some LAME encoded mp3's which record a bit of meta information to say how much of the data at the end is padding.. if your player can support this metadata it can work properly.. if not its ALWAYS a bodge with MP3. Its just a limitation of the MP3 format.

That said it will actually 'appear' to work in some cases as the encoder will probably strip off the silence when you convert it to ogg.. although going from mp3 to ogg isnt gona help the quality either..

Basically the best option would be for Android to read the LAME meta info.. which would make it work as close to how it was intended as is possible with MP3

Edited August 17, 2010 by sambartle