Gapless playback doesn't work

[Dan Mundy]

In Ubuntu 11.10, Banshee doesn't support gapless playback very well. It has an option in the preferences that claims to enable the feature, but it simply doesn't.

With AAC and MP3, this is due to a format limitation. In those formats, the frame length is fixed, and so the last frame has some silence at the end, causing a slight gap. Several encoders, like LAME and Nero AAC, have implemented a tag that stores the correct track length in milliseconds. However, Banshee ignores this metadata, introducing the small gap at the end of each track.

With FLAC, this shouldn't be an issue. However, there's an even larger and more noticeable gap between FLAC songs.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Cue two or more gapless songs, such as those on side B of Abbey Road by The Beatles.
2. Play both songs in the correct order.
3. Observe the gap.

This bug was already marked as fixed in this Launchpad around 2006, but it's clearly not.

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

On 19/02/2012 05:09, Dan Mundy wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> In Ubuntu 11.10, Banshee doesn't support gapless playback very well. It
> has an option in the preferences that claims to enable the feature, but
> it simply doesn't.
>
> With AAC and MP3, this is due to a format limitation. In those formats,
> the frame length is fixed, and so the last frame has some silence at the
> end, causing a slight gap. Several encoders, like LAME and Nero AAC,
> have implemented a tag that stores the correct track length in
> milliseconds. However, Banshee ignores this metadata, introducing the
> small gap at the end of each track.
>
> With FLAC, this shouldn't be an issue. However, there's an even larger
> and more noticeable gap between FLAC songs.
>
> Steps to reproduce:
> 1. Cue two or more gapless songs, such as those on side B of Abbey Road by The Beatles.
> 2. Play both songs in the correct order.
> 3. Observe the gap.
>
> This bug was already marked as fixed in this Launchpad around 2006, but
> it's clearly not.

Could you upload some sample flac files please? It could be that the flac files
themselves were encoded with gaps in them. Checking with Audacity might help.

  status incomplete

--
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

[Dan Mundy (exchgr)]

The files are encoded without gaps. In fact, these are the files that I run through every player I test for gapless playback. They play flawlessly in Foobar2000. But here they are.

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

On 23/02/2012 12:56, Dan Mundy wrote:
> The files are encoded without gaps. In fact, these are the files that I
> run through every player I test for gapless playback. They play
> flawlessly in Foobar2000. But here they are.
>
> ** Attachment added: "Two gapless songs from the B side of Abbey Road"
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/banshee/+bug/935762/+attachment/2773700/+files/The%20Beatles%20-%20Polythene%20Pam%20and%20Bathroom%20Window.tar.bz2
>

Thanks for the bug. I've forwarded it to the upstream bug tracker (see the
gnome-bugs link). Please subscribe yourself to that bug for future updates.

  affects ubuntu/banshee
  status triaged

--
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

As mentioned in the GNOME bugzilla, there's a gapless issue in gstreamer plugins base 0.10.36 which is only present in Ubuntu Precise. Could you check if you see this issue on Precise as well?

[Dan Mundy (exchgr)]

I installed gstreamer plugins 0.10.36 from the gstreamer-developers PPA under Oneiric, and it seems to have fixed the problem for FLAC files. However, the aforementioned problem with M4A files still exists, and that's due to either gstreamer or banshee ignoring the track length metadata.

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

As per comments #6 and #7 on https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=670664, I'm reassigning this bug to Gstreamer.