I've seen this mentioned a couple of times at this forum, but most replies miss the point. The Ogg Vorbis format, like some other modern ones, has support for TRUE gapless playback built-in, not the cross-fading workaround most other players use. Ogg Vorbis stores the info needed to seamlessly join two tracks, like those live albums some bands release, or classical works, in which this gap, no matter how short, is quite distracting. I can't find the specifics at the moment (and it IS late over here right now) I won't give any links to resources you could use. There should be some more if someone does a google search, but right now I'm going to bed. I hope this is of some use to you.
(nevermind, here is a wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_playback )
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Ogg enables this by requiring the metadata to include the exact number of samples in the track. Other formats (MP3 in particular) only require the number of frames (usually 1/75 second I think, CDs certainly are) to be specified, but recent versions of Lame optionally include the number of samples in the metadata too.
The other half of the problem is that the player needs to a) look for and use the metadata on number of samples, and b) needs to double buffer the audio data to avoid a seek and decode pause when tracks change. This is not cutting edge software design, but it does require some thought in the layout of the code base to get it right.
The Rio Karma got it right, Rockbox gets it right on most (if not all) platforms, and the new 5.5G iPods get it right (apparently). I know of no other portable players that do gapless properly. The Rio Karma also had some logic that, in the absence of "number of samples" metadata, would look for perfect silence at the end of the last frame of an MP3 and would trim this off the track. When combined with good double buffering this results in gapless playback, even on traditional MP3 files.
Richard
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That's true, and I don't really mind when players use that technique, but sometimes that approach results in some silence removed when it was meant to be there. I don't know if it is even feasible to implement any of this on most s60 phones, but at least those not crippled to stop them from playing ngage games should be capable of doing it.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I've seen this mentioned a couple of times at this forum, but most replies miss the point. The Ogg Vorbis format, like some other modern ones, has support for TRUE gapless playback built-in, not the cross-fading workaround most other players use. Ogg Vorbis stores the info needed to seamlessly join two tracks, like those live albums some bands release, or classical works, in which this gap, no matter how short, is quite distracting. I can't find the specifics at the moment (and it IS late over here right now) I won't give any links to resources you could use. There should be some more if someone does a google search, but right now I'm going to bed. I hope this is of some use to you.
(nevermind, here is a wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_playback )
Ogg enables this by requiring the metadata to include the exact number of samples in the track. Other formats (MP3 in particular) only require the number of frames (usually 1/75 second I think, CDs certainly are) to be specified, but recent versions of Lame optionally include the number of samples in the metadata too.
The other half of the problem is that the player needs to a) look for and use the metadata on number of samples, and b) needs to double buffer the audio data to avoid a seek and decode pause when tracks change. This is not cutting edge software design, but it does require some thought in the layout of the code base to get it right.
The Rio Karma got it right, Rockbox gets it right on most (if not all) platforms, and the new 5.5G iPods get it right (apparently). I know of no other portable players that do gapless properly. The Rio Karma also had some logic that, in the absence of "number of samples" metadata, would look for perfect silence at the end of the last frame of an MP3 and would trim this off the track. When combined with good double buffering this results in gapless playback, even on traditional MP3 files.
Richard
That's true, and I don't really mind when players use that technique, but sometimes that approach results in some silence removed when it was meant to be there. I don't know if it is even feasible to implement any of this on most s60 phones, but at least those not crippled to stop them from playing ngage games should be capable of doing it.