MediaMonkey forum

I was wondering if MM supports gapless playback especially with LAME MP3?

Yes it does with mp3, but you have to set your output plugin occordingly.
With MM-DirectSound Output plugin: Disable Crossfade, enable Remove Silence and Hardware acceleration.
Or you can use WaveOutput: Set Buffer lenght to 2000 ms or more, Prebuffer and Buffer-ahead to more than 1000 sec.

Works fine for me :~)

When you select the option: Remove Silence and Hardware acceleration:

LAME-encoded MP3 can be gapless with players that support the LAME Mp3 info tag.

Does Mediamonkey support the LAME Mp3 info tag?

I'm not aware of any real difference in LAME tag vs other encoders. The mp3 tag, also known as ID3 (ID3v1, ID3v2 ...) contains the song's information like title, artist, length... is the same format for all encoders. Only the music data is different.

Eyal wrote:I'm not aware of any real difference in LAME tag vs other encoders. The mp3 tag, also known as ID3 (ID3v1, ID3v2 ...) contains the song's information like title, artist, length... is the same format for all encoders. Only the music data is different.

It's not the ID3v2 'metadata' tags we're talking about. MP3 files encoded by LAME have a special 'info tag' in the header that contains the information required for true gapless playback: Encoder Delay, and Encoder Padding.

A MP3 decoder that reads this special info from LAME MP3 files can cleanly playback content from MP3 files gaplessly without any guessing. This, of course, is not officially part of the MP3 standard, which has no provision for true gapless playback.

You taught me something new. I never heard of it.

foobar2000 has true gapless playback with LAME mp3 so I'm gonna use foobar2000 instead of MediaMonkey.

MediaMonkey _does_ support Lame Info tag and so it also has true gapless playback of such tracks. On other tracks, it tries to emulate gapless playback as close as possible using Remove Silence option.

Jiri

For me it does not playback gapless in either setting DirectSound or wave_out. The Mp3s are encoded by LAME and WinAmp does play them gapless. Even my iRiver plays them gapless, using Rockbox of course.

Like eboyer93 and grommet wrote, there is a special LAME tag that contains the information required for true gapless playback: Encoder Delay, and Encoder Padding.

All ohter features beat Winamp and other players I know, but if it does not support gapless playback it's useless for me. I hope that MediaMonkey will support true gapless playback soon!

If you have tracks that don't play gaplessly, please e-mail them to me (some short example, if possible). Btw, do you use the default in_wmp3.dll input plug-in?

Jiri

Thanks for your quick reply Jiri!

You can easily check using CDex (http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/) and choose lame encoder, take your favorite live-CD (or any other CD where the audio does not stop on track transitions) and rip to MP3. Then play back in MM and listen to the transitions. Be sure to turn off crossfade first!

To compare how it should sound playback also with Winamp.

nieroster

nieroster wrote:Thanks for your quick reply Jiri!

You can easily check using CDex (http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/) and choose lame encoder, take your favorite live-CD (or any other CD where the audio does not stop on track transitions) and rip to MP3. Then play back in MM and listen to the transitions. Be sure to turn off crossfade first!

To compare how it should sound playback also with Winamp.

nieroster

That's a lot more work than just sending some tracks to Jiri's email.

nohitter151 wrote:

nieroster wrote:Thanks for your quick reply Jiri!

You can easily check using CDex (http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/) and choose lame encoder, take your favorite live-CD (or any other CD where the audio does not stop on track transitions) and rip to MP3. Then play back in MM and listen to the transitions. Be sure to turn off crossfade first!

To compare how it should sound playback also with Winamp.

nieroster

That's a lot more work than just sending some tracks to Jiri's email.

But it's a lot faster than transferring xx MB's via email!

The thing is that similar tests were already done previously when this feature was implemented in MM (remember, as I wrote above, this really already _is_ implemented in MM). There certainly can be some bug in MM and therefore I'm interested in a particular set of tracks that definitely doesn't work on some machine (there can be some dependence on Lame version, etc.).

Jiri

Ok. I understand. I just thought it might be the easier way, because nearly all of my MP3's do not play gapless in MM.

Where shall I send the files to?

nieroster