Gapless revisited

[Andrew Clarke]

I've recently installed the Media Monkey app for Android to my Samsung Tab A tablet, and this product allows me to chose between gapped and gapless playback - the default is gapless. I'm impressed.
Do not bother with the JRiver Android app. Despite the fact that they charge good money for the thing, I can't get it to work and neither can other people. This is a pity, because their product for Windows is excellent, and I've been using it for years.
Further down Skid Row, I'm quite impressed with the media player on my little Nokia 3310 retro mobile phone, priced at about AUD$90.00 at all good discount stores. It searches by folders (not by albums) which IMHO is the way to go for classical music. It doesn't do gapless and HiFi it ain't, but it comes in very useful when walking the dog and similar activities. It's also extremely durable, having survived a spin in the washing machine after some careful drying-out.
Meanwhile, the default media player on my Chromebook is also gapless, praise the Lord.
So everything's gapless in our household except the Sony BluRay player and my Nokia phone. I'll continue to splice attacca movements together with Audacity, because this means I can play my music on anything. gapless or otherwise.

Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Peter]

I'm currently using VLC, which has some issues: not gapless, sometimes freezes for no apparent reason. OTOH, it allows me to locate music by folders, and I have an elaborate hierarchical system which is nice for finding specific CDs or just browsing through a composer, period, etc. Does Media Monkey allow you to select music via folder?

Post by Andrew Clarke
I've recently installed the Media Monkey app for Android to my Samsung Tab A tablet, and this product allows me to chose between gapped and gapless playback - the default is gapless. I'm impressed.
Do not bother with the JRiver Android app. Despite the fact that they charge good money for the thing, I can't get it to work and neither can other people. This is a pity, because their product for Windows is excellent, and I've been using it for years.
Further down Skid Row, I'm quite impressed with the media player on my little Nokia 3310 retro mobile phone, priced at about AUD$90.00 at all good discount stores. It searches by folders (not by albums) which IMHO is the way to go for classical music. It doesn't do gapless and HiFi it ain't, but it comes in very useful when walking the dog and similar activities. It's also extremely durable, having survived a spin in the washing machine after some careful drying-out.
Meanwhile, the default media player on my Chromebook is also gapless, praise the Lord.
So everything's gapless in our household except the Sony BluRay player and my Nokia phone. I'll continue to splice attacca movements together with Audacity, because this means I can play my music on anything. gapless or otherwise.
Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Andrew Clarke]

I'm currently using VLC, which has some issues: not gapless, sometimes freezes for no apparent reason. OTOH, it allows me to locate music by folders, and I have an elaborate hierarchical system which is nice for finding specific CDs or just browsing through a composer, period, etc. Does Media Monkey allow you to select music via folder?

The free version doesn't, but the modestly-priced Media Monkey Pro will navigate folders quite happily.

Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Mr. Mike]

But is gapless really gapless?

A long time ago, I put Reiner's Chicago Pictures at an Exhibition into
iTunes and saved the tracks as mp3s or whatever the default format is.

Then I used those files to create a CD using iTunes of just that piece
which was supposed to be "gapless."

Listening to the thing on headphones, I could still detect very teeny
gaps!

[Andrew Clarke]

Post by Mr. Mike
But is gapless really gapless?
A long time ago, I put Reiner's Chicago Pictures at an Exhibition into
iTunes and saved the tracks as mp3s or whatever the default format is.
Then I used those files to create a CD using iTunes of just that piece
which was supposed to be "gapless."
Listening to the thing on headphones, I could still detect very teeny
gaps!

Here at Fleabag Audio we don't have iTunes, but we do use the AAC codec, which I believe is also standard for Apple these days. I can honestly say that I've never burnt a CD in my life, so I can't say whether burners come in gapped/gapless versions. Miniscule gaps probably wouldn't bother me in any case.

You raise an interesting point - how many concert hall performances of the work would be absolutely gapless?

Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Peter]

A further question: does MM (free/pro) permit you to begin playing a folder (a CD) a few tracks in and then continue the playback until the end? This is a nice feature if you want to skip a piece or if you are listening to a ripped CD, need to stop and want to pick up again where you left off. Yes, I know you can pause playback and then continue later, but maybe you want to listen to something different in between. Example: I am listening to a CD while working out. My session ends in the middle. Then I'm playing different music for some other purpose, and the following day I want to go back to the first CD more or less where I stopped and have the remainder play back while I huff and puff.

What I least like about VLC is that you have only two choices (unless you want to go through the senseless rigamarole of creating a playlist): either play a folder from the beginning or just a single track within it.

Post by Andrew Clarke

I'm currently using VLC, which has some issues: not gapless, sometimes freezes for no apparent reason. OTOH, it allows me to locate music by folders, and I have an elaborate hierarchical system which is nice for finding specific CDs or just browsing through a composer, period, etc. Does Media Monkey allow you to select music via folder?

The free version doesn't, but the modestly-priced Media Monkey Pro will navigate folders quite happily.
Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Andrew Clarke]

A further question: does MM (free/pro) permit you to begin playing a folder (a CD) a few tracks in and then continue the playback until the end? This is a nice feature if you want to skip a piece or if you are listening to a ripped CD, need to stop and want to pick up again where you left off. Yes, I know you can pause playback and then continue later, but maybe you want to listen to something different in between. Example: I am listening to a CD while working out. My session ends in the middle. Then I'm playing different music for some other purpose, and the following day I want to go back to the first CD more or less where I stopped and have the remainder play back while I huff and puff.
What I least like about VLC is that you have only two choices (unless you want to go through the senseless rigamarole of creating a playlist): either play a folder from the beginning or just a single track within it.

Yes, the pro version of MM allows you to go into a folder and start at (e.g.) track 4, happily continuing automatically with subsequent movements in the same folder until the end. If you stop playing (e.g.) Corelli, go to the gym, play (e.g.) Brahms and then want to hear the Corelli again, you can go back to your folder and click on a little 'bookmark' icon at the top which will take you to the track you were playing.

Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Peter]

Thanks -- that's a very big plus for CM users, for whom the sequence of tracks is immensely important. Incidentally, I can report that the somewhat higher end DAC on LG phones makes a difference for playback quality. I used to have a Samsung and it wasn't as good. It's nice to have a micro SD card with most of my collection on it for access during workouts, travel, etc.

Post by Andrew Clarke

A further question: does MM (free/pro) permit you to begin playing a folder (a CD) a few tracks in and then continue the playback until the end? This is a nice feature if you want to skip a piece or if you are listening to a ripped CD, need to stop and want to pick up again where you left off. Yes, I know you can pause playback and then continue later, but maybe you want to listen to something different in between. Example: I am listening to a CD while working out. My session ends in the middle. Then I'm playing different music for some other purpose, and the following day I want to go back to the first CD more or less where I stopped and have the remainder play back while I huff and puff.
What I least like about VLC is that you have only two choices (unless you want to go through the senseless rigamarole of creating a playlist): either play a folder from the beginning or just a single track within it.

Yes, the pro version of MM allows you to go into a folder and start at (e.g.) track 4, happily continuing automatically with subsequent movements in the same folder until the end. If you stop playing (e.g.) Corelli, go to the gym, play (e.g.) Brahms and then want to hear the Corelli again, you can go back to your folder and click on a little 'bookmark' icon at the top which will take you to the track you were playing.
Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[r***@gmail.com]

Thanks -- that's a very big plus for CM users, for whom the sequence of tracks is immensely important. Incidentally, I can report that the somewhat higher end DAC on LG phones makes a difference for playback quality. I used to have a Samsung and it wasn't as good. It's nice to have a micro SD card with most of my collection on it for access during workouts, travel, etc.

Post by Andrew Clarke

A further question: does MM (free/pro) permit you to begin playing a folder (a CD) a few tracks in and then continue the playback until the end? This is a nice feature if you want to skip a piece or if you are listening to a ripped CD, need to stop and want to pick up again where you left off. Yes, I know you can pause playback and then continue later, but maybe you want to listen to something different in between. Example: I am listening to a CD while working out. My session ends in the middle. Then I'm playing different music for some other purpose, and the following day I want to go back to the first CD more or less where I stopped and have the remainder play back while I huff and puff.
What I least like about VLC is that you have only two choices (unless you want to go through the senseless rigamarole of creating a playlist): either play a folder from the beginning or just a single track within it.

Yes, the pro version of MM allows you to go into a folder and start at (e.g.) track 4, happily continuing automatically with subsequent movements in the same folder until the end. If you stop playing (e.g.) Corelli, go to the gym, play (e.g.) Brahms and then want to hear the Corelli again, you can go back to your folder and click on a little 'bookmark' icon at the top which will take you to the track you were playing.
Andrew Clarke
Canberra

I gave up on using my phone for music when some of it disappeared into 'the cloud' and was unavailable without a cellular signal (a great deal of the US landmass, including the parts of Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto that I was passing through). I now use the Sony Walkman with an added 400MB mini SD card for travel purposes. It plays most formats, and sounds as good as the headphones or bluetooth system you might use.

[Peter]

I also have too much time invested into ripping CDs to gamble with cloud storage. I've got a 1Tb mini SD card in my phone, and all its contents are mirrored in an external HD. (Phones can get damaged or lost.) I've found the DAC in the signal source makes a difference even in the lower end, non-audiophile world of cell phones. It's funny that there are no online reviews comparing DAC's across different phone producers.

Incidentally, I downloaded Media Monkey pro, and so far it's fine, except I don't see how I can play a higher level folder like I could with VLC. Example: I might have a folder for an opera and subfolders for the individual CDs. In VLC I could select the opera folder to be played, and the player would go through each of the CD subfolders; this would be useful in a long car trip, eliminating the need to pull over and shift my attention to selecting a new folder to play. In MM it seems that one clicks on the first track of a folder to play that folder, but that only works one folder at a time. Not a big deal but still a defect. I may need to switch back to VLC on occasions when I want more than 80 minutes of music without fiddling with the phone en route.

I gave up on using my phone for music when some of it disappeared into 'the cloud' and was unavailable without a cellular signal (a great deal of the US landmass, including the parts of Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto that I was passing through). I now use the Sony Walkman with an added 400MB mini SD card for travel purposes. It plays most formats, and sounds as good as the headphones or bluetooth system you might use.

[r***@gmail.com]

I also have too much time invested into ripping CDs to gamble with cloud storage. I've got a 1Tb mini SD card in my phone, and all its contents are mirrored in an external HD. (Phones can get damaged or lost.) I've found the DAC in the signal source makes a difference even in the lower end, non-audiophile world of cell phones. It's funny that there are no online reviews comparing DAC's across different phone producers.
Incidentally, I downloaded Media Monkey pro, and so far it's fine, except I don't see how I can play a higher level folder like I could with VLC. Example: I might have a folder for an opera and subfolders for the individual CDs. In VLC I could select the opera folder to be played, and the player would go through each of the CD subfolders; this would be useful in a long car trip, eliminating the need to pull over and shift my attention to selecting a new folder to play. In MM it seems that one clicks on the first track of a folder to play that folder, but that only works one folder at a time. Not a big deal but still a defect. I may need to switch back to VLC on occasions when I want more than 80 minutes of music without fiddling with the phone en route.

I gave up on using my phone for music when some of it disappeared into 'the cloud' and was unavailable without a cellular signal (a great deal of the US landmass, including the parts of Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto that I was passing through). I now use the Sony Walkman with an added 400MB mini SD card for travel purposes. It plays most formats, and sounds as good as the headphones or bluetooth system you might use.

I chose the Walkman as being the nearest I could get to the performance of an Ipod classic. I tag performances and individual tracks by artist(s) and composer. I can select on individual pieces (folder), artists, composers, . .
A particularly useful (to me) on a long journey is to play, for example, a single Schubert piano sonata by all the artists I have on the memory card. For both me and my wife Uchida comes out bottom by a long way. Depending on the piece different artists in different vintages seem to stand out in one attribute or another, good or bad.
All the ripping is done on a Lenovo PC running Windows 7 and EZ-CDDA. The SD card gets loaded from external drive arrays.
The Walkman plays any stereo format I've ever come across, from Ogg through mp.. through aac and flac, even ape. No doubt there are limits, there always are, and it doesn't do Dolby surround or SACD, but neither do my cars or headphones.

[[e-mail]]

I also have too much time invested into ripping CDs to gamble with cloud storage. I've got a 1Tb mini SD card in my phone, and all its contents are mirrored in an external HD. (Phones can get damaged or lost.) I've found the DAC in the signal source makes a difference even in the lower end, non-audiophile world of cell phones. It's funny that there are no online reviews comparing DAC's across different phone producers.
Incidentally, I downloaded Media Monkey pro, and so far it's fine, except I don't see how I can play a higher level folder like I could with VLC. Example: I might have a folder for an opera and subfolders for the individual CDs. In VLC I could select the opera folder to be played, and the player would go through each of the CD subfolders; this would be useful in a long car trip, eliminating the need to pull over and shift my attention to selecting a new folder to play. In MM it seems that one clicks on the first track of a folder to play that folder, but that only works one folder at a time. Not a big deal but still a defect. I may need to switch back to VLC on occasions when I want more than 80 minutes of music without fiddling with the phone en route.

I gave up on using my phone for music when some of it disappeared into 'the cloud' and was unavailable without a cellular signal (a great deal of the US landmass, including the parts of Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto that I was passing through). I now use the Sony Walkman with an added 400MB mini SD card for travel purposes. It plays most formats, and sounds as good as the headphones or bluetooth system you might use.

Can't you select what you want to listen to and put it in a Playlist? That is what playlists are for n'est-ce pas?

Ray Hall, Taree

[Peter]

Playlists are clunky, from my point of view. Let's say I have a folder for a Handel opera with three subfolders for the three CDs I ripped from. What I would like is to just click on the folder for the opera and have the whole thing play. I don't want to construct a playlist for this purpose when the music is already organized as I want it. I agree, of course, that if I want a varied music diet over the entire trip, I can take a little time and put together a customized playlist. But I want the software to make my life simpler rather than more complicated.

Post by ***@gmail.com

I also have too much time invested into ripping CDs to gamble with cloud storage. I've got a 1Tb mini SD card in my phone, and all its contents are mirrored in an external HD. (Phones can get damaged or lost.) I've found the DAC in the signal source makes a difference even in the lower end, non-audiophile world of cell phones. It's funny that there are no online reviews comparing DAC's across different phone producers.
Incidentally, I downloaded Media Monkey pro, and so far it's fine, except I don't see how I can play a higher level folder like I could with VLC. Example: I might have a folder for an opera and subfolders for the individual CDs. In VLC I could select the opera folder to be played, and the player would go through each of the CD subfolders; this would be useful in a long car trip, eliminating the need to pull over and shift my attention to selecting a new folder to play. In MM it seems that one clicks on the first track of a folder to play that folder, but that only works one folder at a time. Not a big deal but still a defect. I may need to switch back to VLC on occasions when I want more than 80 minutes of music without fiddling with the phone en route.

I gave up on using my phone for music when some of it disappeared into 'the cloud' and was unavailable without a cellular signal (a great deal of the US landmass, including the parts of Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto that I was passing through). I now use the Sony Walkman with an added 400MB mini SD card for travel purposes. It plays most formats, and sounds as good as the headphones or bluetooth system you might use.

Can't you select what you want to listen to and put it in a Playlist? That is what playlists are for n'est-ce pas?
Ray Hall, Taree

[Andrew Clarke]

Playlists are clunky, from my point of view. Let's say I have a folder for a Handel opera with three subfolders for the three CDs I ripped from. What I would like is to just click on the folder for the opera and have the whole thing play. I don't want to construct a playlist for this purpose when the music is already organized as I want it. I agree, of course, that if I want a varied music diet over the entire trip, I can take a little time and put together a customized playlist. But I want the software to make my life simpler rather than more complicated.

Wouldn't it be easier to break the nexus between file management and the physical discs? Just have one folder for the entire opera. If the tracks on the second and third CD recommence at Track 1, you are going to have to renumber them, but that only has to be done once and it's a tedious job rather than an intellectually demanding one.

Our car's audio system accepts USB drives but our initial experience with opera was that track order was chaotic. Our solution was to use Audacity to combine tracks into half a dozen large files (we use the AAC codec so file size isn't much of an issue). It also gets rid of unwanted gaps ...

Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Peter]

Well yes, that works for an opera, where the individual CDs don't matter much. Bad example. But then there are other folder logics, like sets of a particular composer's piano trios or the WTC or Wadada Smith's 10 Freedom Summers or whatever. Sometimes I want to play the whole set (that long car trip again), sometimes just one CD from it. In the end, this comes down to flexibility. An ideal program would give the use multiple options; one day you could do it one way, another another.

Post by Andrew Clarke

Playlists are clunky, from my point of view. Let's say I have a folder for a Handel opera with three subfolders for the three CDs I ripped from. What I would like is to just click on the folder for the opera and have the whole thing play. I don't want to construct a playlist for this purpose when the music is already organized as I want it. I agree, of course, that if I want a varied music diet over the entire trip, I can take a little time and put together a customized playlist. But I want the software to make my life simpler rather than more complicated.

Wouldn't it be easier to break the nexus between file management and the physical discs? Just have one folder for the entire opera. If the tracks on the second and third CD recommence at Track 1, you are going to have to renumber them, but that only has to be done once and it's a tedious job rather than an intellectually demanding one.
Our car's audio system accepts USB drives but our initial experience with opera was that track order was chaotic. Our solution was to use Audacity to combine tracks into half a dozen large files (we use the AAC codec so file size isn't much of an issue). It also gets rid of unwanted gaps ...
Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Andrew Clarke]

Well yes, that works for an opera, where the individual CDs don't matter much. Bad example. But then there are other folder logics, like sets of a particular composer's piano trios or the WTC or Wadada Smith's 10 Freedom Summers or whatever. Sometimes I want to play the whole set (that long car trip again), sometimes just one CD from it. In the end, this comes down to flexibility. An ideal program would give the use multiple options; one day you could do it one way, another another.

Why not duplicate your files and organise one set one way and the other set in the other?

I've done something similar with Haydn symphonies - and I have all of them. One set is organised in the conventional Hoboken numerical order. The other is organised in the order of composition established by more recent research.

Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Owen]

Post by Andrew Clarke

Well yes, that works for an opera, where the individual CDs don't matter much. Bad example. But then there are other folder logics, like sets of a particular composer's piano trios or the WTC or Wadada Smith's 10 Freedom Summers or whatever. Sometimes I want to play the whole set (that long car trip again), sometimes just one CD from it. In the end, this comes down to flexibility. An ideal program would give the use multiple options; one day you could do it one way, another another.

Why not duplicate your files and organise one set one way and the other set in the other?
I've done something similar with Haydn symphonies - and I have all of them. One set is organised in the conventional Hoboken numerical order. The other is organised in the order of composition established by more recent research.
Andrew Clarke
Canberra

If you use playlists, you can have a playlist for each ordering, and you
don't have to duplicate the actual files. A playlist is merely a set of
pointers to the original music files.

-Owen

[Andrew Clarke]

Post by Owen

Post by Andrew Clarke
Why not duplicate your files and organise one set one way and the other set in the other?
I've done something similar with Haydn symphonies - and I have all of them. One set is organised in the conventional Hoboken numerical order. The other is organised in the order of composition established by more recent research.
Andrew Clarke
Canberra

If you use playlists, you can have a playlist for each ordering, and you
don't have to duplicate the actual files. A playlist is merely a set of
pointers to the original music files.

I did use Windows "short cuts" originally, but then found that "short cuts" only work on the machine on which they were created, i.e. they ain't transferable. These days, one of my playback devices is a BluRay player, which doesn't handle "short cuts" or playlists of any description. The only device I have where playlists would work is my Samsung tablet (and, possibly, my Chromebook).

Andrew Clarke
Canberra

[Alex Brown]

Post by Andrew Clarke
I've recently installed the Media Monkey app for Android to my Samsung Tab A tablet, and this product allows me to chose between gapped and gapless playback - the default is gapless. I'm impressed.
Do not bother with the JRiver Android app. Despite the fact that they charge good money for the thing, I can't get it to work and neither can other people. This is a pity, because their product for Windows is excellent, and I've been using it for years.
Further down Skid Row, I'm quite impressed with the media player on my little Nokia 3310 retro mobile phone, priced at about AUD$90.00 at all good discount stores. It searches by folders (not by albums) which IMHO is the way to go for classical music. It doesn't do gapless and HiFi it ain't, but it comes in very useful when walking the dog and similar activities. It's also extremely durable, having survived a spin in the washing machine after some careful drying-out.
Meanwhile, the default media player on my Chromebook is also gapless, praise the Lord.
So everything's gapless in our household except the Sony BluRay player and my Nokia phone. I'll continue to splice attacca movements together with Audacity, because this means I can play my music on anything. gapless or otherwise.
Andrew Clarke
Canberra

In recent years the gapless situation seems to have improved.

I get gapless FLAC playback on Android using the "Poweramp Music Player"
app.

At home, using a Logitech Media Server, I get gapless FLAC playback of
my local files. This also integrates with Qobuz and I get gapless
streaming of their content (some of which is high-res).