does not support lame mp3 gapless tag

[sarixe]

Binary package hint: rhythmbox

Rhythmbox claims to support gapless playback. It does for the most part, but on mp3's, it doesn't. This is due to the design of mp3 frames. Each frame is a predetermined length of time, and the last frame is no exception, which causes a small silence at the end of each song. LAME has a workaround for this: embed a tag that tells a decoder exactly how long the song should be. iTunes, iPod, and libgpod support this. Rhythmbox neither makes use of this tag in its normal playback, nor for syncing songs to an iPod.

The bug is present in all versions of Rhythmbox, in all versions of Ubuntu.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, that's an upstream request though, could you open the bug on bugzilla.gnome.org where the people writting the code will actually read it since you seem to know the topic and can reply to their comments

[sarixe (sarixe)]

Added bug report on bugzilla.gnome.org

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for sending the bug to GNOME

[amano (jyaku)]

Uploaded a zip file with gapless MP3 test samples (30 seconds of an old classical recording originally posted by guruboolez on the hydrongenaudio.com wiki)

[amano (jyaku)]

The same samples in ogg format. Those should play flawlessly gapless on Audacious and all Gstreamer players already. Just for comparison with the broken gstreamer plugins.

MPG123 from the repos should play even the MP3 files fine becaus the mpg123 decoder can handle the LAME info tag correctly.

[amano (jyaku)]

Since all GStreamer based applications seem affected this is rather a problem of the current GStreamer decoder plugins and/or within the GStreamer pipeline.

In the repos the following packages offer Gstreamer decoding support
*Both fluendo MP3 packages (why are there two of them?)
*gstreamer0.10-plugins ugly
*gstreamer-ffmpeg

The fluendo plugins seem to be based on the frauenhoffer reference implementation of MP3, the other plugins seem to be compiled against the libmad library. None decoder is compiled against the mpg123 decoder which proves within the mpg123 command line tool that it is actually able to handle the LAME info tag correctly.

Links:
*http://www.mpg123.de/
*http://gst.homeunix.net/?by-user=t

An attempt by Stefan Kost to get the mpg123 decoder into gstreamer obviously came to nothing in March 2009: http://gstreamer-devel.966125.n4.nabble.com/mpg123-GStreamer-plugin-td971440.html Probably forgotten since there was no further communication.

[amano (jyaku)]

CCing Onkar Shinde and Sebastian Dröge.

[amano (jyaku)]

The upcoming Audacious 2.4 switched to the mpg123 decoder from libmad as well and is now playing my MP3s gaplessly, too!!!

There is a backports PPA from Benjamin Drung with this version: http://www.liveoxy.com/index.php?q=a...YWNrcG9ydHM%3D to test that version out. Perfectly gapless with my MP3 samples above.

[amano (jyaku)]

CCing Stefan Kost since his idea of switching to a mpg123 gstreamer-plugin seems to be the most promising thing to get gapless playing for MP3s working.

I contacted Roland Poppenreiter by mail and directed him to the upstream bug to have a look why his gst-plugin didn't work for me. It might be that it works with a newer GStreamer version. Maybe somebody with a current 32-bit Maverick install can test out his plugin from http://gst.homeunix.net/?by-user=t

[amano (jyaku)]

I changed the package from gstreamer0.10 to gstreamer1.0 since 0.10 isn't getting developed anymore. I don't know if the combinantion of Rhythmbox 3.01 with gstreamer1.0 in Trusty will yield better results than the combination in Saucy since I haven't upgraded yet.