*true* gapless playback audio player for linux?

Blimey, I'm up against it today...

OK, I'm looking for a gapless audio player I can use with Debian. I have a mixture of OGGs, MP3s ands FLACs. I quite like the interface of Rhythymbox (the default with Debian and GNOME), but it does not play gaplessly.

I really want total gapless-ness because I listen to lots of classical and dance music in which tracks follow on seamlessly. My iaudio X5 music player can do it with rockbox on it, so I would hope my proper computer can do it! And I don't mean "cross-fading" either, I mean totally seamless transition from one track to the next.

So, is there anything that works more or less like Rhythymbox but can actually do proper gapless playback of OGGs, MP3s and FLACs?

Things I have already tried which do NOT do gapless (please correct me if I'm wrong):

banshee
bmpx
aqualung (it says it does, but I can't load any music into the Library)
amarok
mplayer / totem / ogle (all use xine backend which can't do it)

MPD claims to have support for gapless playback.

Might as well add alsaplayer to your list; it has a tiny gap between Ogg tracks. I suspect this is because its threading isn't quite working correctly, or it's because it doesn't load the next track in until the current track stops playing.

Audacious might work, but I don't have any tracks handy that will show any kind of gap between them. (I used to -- that's how I know that Alsaplayer doesn't work -- but I don't remember which of my 600 songs they were. :()

Is there not a plugin for xmms?? Maybe you can set the crossfader to something like 1 300miliseconds, that way your ear won't notice... or if you ar using kde, try Amarok...

I've so nearly fixed this, but not quite...

I downloaded and installed a Debian package for rythymbox, but from the "unstable" branch this time (all the dependencies seemed to be met easily using my current "testing" install). This newer version includes the cross-fade function.

It seemed like it was OK once I turned on the cross-fade function but left it at zero seconds' gap. While listening to a bunch of different dance mixes (breaks, drum-n-bass, house) it seemed OK, no gaps between tracks, no perceptible messing-up of the rythym. BUT...

With classical music, you can definitely hear a kind of click or pop where the tracks join. I guess the general clatter of the drums in the dance music masks it.

Argh!

might the problem be that the track itself has a second of blank audio at the end?

Not every song ends on the last note, I would think especially not classical.

Unfortunately that's not the problem. For example, say I'm trying to play Roy Harris' 3rd Symphony, which I ripped to OGG format from my CD.

The whole symphony is one long continuous performance, but it has five parts.

On my IAudio X5 (with Rockbox firmware), the five parts just flow together, you can't hear the joins, just like a CD player. But with Rythymbox, there's a "click" which you can hear very clearly, especially when there are no percussion sounds around the point where the tracks join up.

I have to assume it exists when I'm listening to Drum-n-Bass, but that the noise of the drums covers up the click.

Have you tried QuodLibet? It *claims* to have gapless playback capability with some minor configuring using Xine as a backend. I may have to try it myself, as I searched for the same awhile ago...

At least from my futile search in the past(it's been a few years), I came to realize that it was not possible with the current code sets. At least at the time there were three main code sets, xine, mpd, and gstreamer. As neither of the three had a true gapless function, most implementations were DSP crossfade at 0s or near 0s fade which depending on each song will or will not cause a click sound on transition. No matter how many frontend programs are written, until the core functions are improved, you won't get true gapless. Maybe these functions have improved or a new one has come out? Dunno, my final solution was to either put up with it or create one file out of the whole CD so there wouldn't be a break to transition. So if you look at my current music archive, most albums are one file per song, except for classical and tecno which are entire sets, symphonies, etc. as one file. After awhile you get used to oh yea my favorite song is 23 minutes 30 seconds in! :cool:

Another thing to watch for, is to make sure you have a 100% clean file. I remember a few songs that ripped with a skip from a scratched CD that I thought was a DSP problem. I opened up the WAV stream and saw the Decrescendo as the song came to the end, but then saw a spike. Did a little minor cleanup and you can't notice it anymore.

On that note, you could also open the 5 individual ogg files in audacity, link them sequentially and then export tham as one big one...

But I do see your point that a true gapless player is the ideal...