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[videoman]

Two questions -

I have soundtracks that I use in our church where each song is divided into 4 or 5 tracks so that you can access particular parts of a song when practicing.  When playing off of the cd the tracks play seamlessly so the song sounds normal.  When playing from a ripped version using MJ I am getting slight gaps between tracks.  I have adjusted the settings to gapless and seamless but cannot get a perfectly seamless play off of the drive.  Is there a way or do I need to look at other software?

Also, is there a plugin that will let me mute either left or right channel for use with split track music?

Thanks in advance!

[Sergio]

Yes, there is a problem with gapless playing in Media Jukebox as in all other multimedia players I've tried. Some file types, among which are MP3 and WMA seem to dislike gapless and the players always play them with a small gap, even in gapless mode. That's the files' problem, not the player.

There is an alternative, but it's not very good either, which is using crossfade with the minimum duration, 0.1 s, but the crossfading still is perceptible.

What I have suggested several times to the development team here on the forums, and never got a direct answer, probably because they didn't understand my proposal, is that a new playback mode should be added to MJ to specifically handle gapless playing on gapless-unfriendly file types. Kind of an "MP3-gapless" playback mode. I also said it could be done by using the same crossfading mechanism, only with an even smaller duration, say 0.01 s, so that it's imperceptible to the human ear.

Just my 0.1€

[Doof]

Or you could just rip it to wav or ape and avoid the gaps altogether. You pay a price in filesize (ape is about half the size of wav - mp3 is about a tenth the size of wav), but there are no gaps to be concerned with.

[gkerber]

I've researched this myself, I had the same frustration.  You CAN'T go gapless with mpe3, it's not MJ's problem.  Take a look at any mp3 file ins a program that lets you view the waveform.  There is always silence at the start/end of the track.  Some mp3 encoders claim to be able to go gapless, but I've never got it to work.  And to work, they need to move parts from one track to the other.

Wav files by their nature are gapless, and I've found that APE encoding will encode gapless.  I'm told there are others.  MP3 really sucks for many reasons...

[KellerDH]

MediaJukebox isn't the premier ripper that it could be (yet), but that said, try to find one that will rip what are referred to as "partial tracks".  This involves the squeezing together of several tracks into one.  A decent product that I've had good experiences with is CDex.  It's free, and solid.  To be honest though, I've never tried to use partial tracks to get gaplessness, so you'll have to try it to make sure that my reasoning holds true.  You'll still need to do your usual single-track ripping, of course.  This is not the perfect fix for you.  Good luck.

[sekim]

videoman,

What format are you burning? If it's just a standard cd try using the generic driver in the options. It will kill the two second gap.

Or you could use the disk writer feature and make a standard cd that way with little or no gap after some trial and error. This is a round about way, but effective for what you seek.

Not sure about the other.

[gkerber]

The 2 second gap is not the problem.  It's the very small amout of silence that added before and after the encoded track by the mp3 encoder.   For most music, it's meaningless.  But for live albums and Pink Floyd, the audible gap ruins the whole thing.  So I use APE, which will encode with the added silence.

CompUSA has a Western Digital 120 gig 7200 rpm with 8mb buffer for $110 (after rebates).  Disk space is cheap.

[sekim]

OOPS! Read over the ripped part without it sinking in. Disregard.

[Mr.X]

Ok. This seems like a common subject, and there is plenty of what I feel is mis-information on the web and elsewhere about it. I decided to do a little experiment to see if it is true that mp3's cannot be made gapless and also separate files for each track.

What I found may surprise you!

Please set your Playback options to "gapless" and take a listen to the following tracks, one after the other:

PF1.MP3
PF2.MP3

(My apolgies to pink floyd)

Here is what they normally sound like, being encoded in the standard way:

PF3.MP3
PF4.MP3


How did I do it, you ask???

-Mr.X

[gkerber]

Okay, you must tell me how you did it?  You've got my interest.

[Mr.X]

It's pretty simple.

1.  Rip the 2 tracks to .WAV, using EAC.
1a. (Cut the tracks using MJ's Media editor) - Just for this demo
2.  lame.exe --r3mix --nogap PF1.wav PF2.wav

That's it! It creates PF1.mp3 and PF2.mp3

Hopefully there's enough interest in this for JRiver to add the ability to ripping options in MJ8 (or perhaps 9)

-Mr.X

[Mirko]

I have been told that you shouldn't use --r3mix anymore (I personally did this quite a long time). Now man should use --alt-preset standard (which takes more or less the same time)... but...

Gapless play with normal MP3 _is_ possible. It's "only" very difficult. Because of the overlapping in MP3-frames, the player has to decode the last couple of frames from the first MP3 and combine it with the first couple of frames of the second one. I read that somewhere on the internet...

Thanks for the "--nogap"-options. But as far as I know this reduces the quality of the encoded file (because the encoder has to left out the overlappings and that automatically reduces the efficienty of the encoding process -> read that also, no own experience).

Hopefully sometime we get gapless playback. I think an other way of doing this is internally decode to wave and play that. Because you can burn CDRs without gaps, so the functionality is already there I guess.

Mirko

[Sergio]

Still, lots of people have got their albums already ripped, and don't want to / can't rip them again. And besides, the problem still is there for other formats.

I think the new playback mode I suggested would solve the problem and would be easy to implement, since it's based on something that already exists: smooth crossfading with, say, 0.01 s duration.

I'd really like to get a reply from the dev people on this, whether it's possible, whether it would work, and whether you'll add it

[Poison Dan]

Or you could just rip it to wav or ape and avoid the gaps altogether. You pay a price in filesize (ape is about half the size of wav - mp3 is about a tenth the size of wav), but there are no gaps to be concerned with.

Or rip to OGG or MPC. These formats also play perfectly gapless.

I have been told that you shouldn't use --r3mix anymore (I personally did this quite a long time). Now man should use --alt-preset standard (which takes more or less the same time)...

Amen.

[gkerber]

I had trouble getting --nogap to work properly, what is the --r3mix option?

I've always been against any lossy encoding, lost bits are gone forever.  I gave in a bit with mp3 320 and MJ, so I could get my whole collection on hd.  But I've gone fully to APE format, non-lossy and gapless playback included with no difficulty.

And hd space is so cheap now....

[Mirko]

@gkeper: Do yourself a favour and simply forget you ever heard about "--r3mix". Use "--alt-preset standard".

--r3mix is a shortage for _many_ other options, which in combination should deliver best possible (archive) quality. This is proven wrong (hydrogenaudio, look at the link poisan dan gave). And I was also :-(

[Mr.X]

Hey guys, can we get back on track here?

Start a new thread if you want to discuss the LAME encoding presets. I want to know what people think about the --nogap switch.

-Mr.X

[Mirko]

You made my day, Mr. X :-)

--no-gap is an encoding switch.