LinuxMCE Forums

General => Users => Topic started by: colinjones on February 29, 2008, 01:08:34 am

Title: Gaps between tracks in music playback/chapters/options?
Post by: colinjones on February 29, 2008, 01:08:34 am
I'm having difficulty with any mixed (DJ), continuous or classical music that I play. The old problem of gaps between tracks.... it makes the music really annoying to listen to! We listen to this type of stuff all the time ...

The problem seems to be split into 2:

1. Gaps in audio of CD: the CD standard (redbook) defines a 2 second gap, but many CDs ignore this standard because they need the music to flow from one track to the next (come to think of it Audio Books will probably have the same issue). But LMCE seems to enforce these...

2. After ripping the CD, obviously the orginal CD structure is now irrelevant, but (after logging a Mantis and discussing it with Kir) it seems that the problem is not easy to solve in the LMCE architecture because each mp3 is triggered by a play_media event, and then finishes with a media finished event which triggers the next media file and this makes it difficult to seemlessly stream these together, not to mention that the audio hardware probably closes the stream in between which would likely cause a "pop" if there was no gap

So I am trying to think of a way of fixing this. I have concatenated all the tracks into one super-mp3! But this means there is no ability to navigate from track to track....

What I am wondering is, do any of the audio container formats have the facility for "chapters" or "tracks"? I have looked at ogg on wikipedia and it seems to suggest that it may support this but it isn't clear whether that is for audio or video.

Any suggestions? If ogg can do it, does anybody have any suggestions for a rip tool that will do the chapters/tracks automatically, AND does LMCE even take any notice of these??
Title: Re: Gaps between tracks in music playback/chapters/options?
Post by: Marie.O on February 29, 2008, 03:52:03 pm
Just to chime in here.

The gap is really annoying, especially listening to classical music, live concerts and audio books. Do you have the mantis # for this problem?

rgds
Oliver
Title: Re: Gaps between tracks in music playback/chapters/options?
Post by: colinjones on February 29, 2008, 09:14:14 pm
Yes, 3865 - and the response to my last mesg is not good although I don't see what the problem is....
Title: Re: Gaps between tracks in music playback/chapters/options?
Post by: colinjones on March 04, 2008, 01:35:57 am
BUMP!

Did anybody have any suggestions on my main question?

"What I am wondering is, do any of the audio container formats have the facility for "chapters" or "tracks"? I have looked at ogg on wikipedia and it seems to suggest that it may support this but it isn't clear whether that is for audio or video.

Any suggestions? If ogg can do it, does anybody have any suggestions for a rip tool that will do the chapters/tracks automatically, AND does LMCE even take any notice of these??"
Title: Re: Gaps between tracks in music playback/chapters/options?
Post by: Marie.O on March 04, 2008, 08:59:15 am
colin,

the problem seems, that the current implementations uses a single file/track metaphor for playing audio media. For video it plays a disc, but for audio the track and/or file is defined to be played. It goes something like
DCERouter says "Xine play Track 1"
Xine says: "Playing ---"
Xine says: "Done. Quitting"
DCERouter receives quitting, looks up next file/track to play
DCERouter say "Xine play Track "

To have continuous playback DCERouter has to be extended to say
DCERouter says "Xine play this playlist"
Xine says: "Playing ---"

That way, it might work with Xine and seemless playback. But it is not coded that way. Do a feature request for 0804.

rgds
Oliver
Title: Re: Gaps between tracks in music playback/chapters/options?
Post by: colinjones on March 04, 2008, 12:45:38 pm
posde - thanks, that is the mantis that I already logged, and they have said "this will be hard"! And it has been put on the back burner....

What about the rip file format question, and chapters/indices - any suggestions on that? OGG supports chapters but not sure if it is only for video, or if LMCE would even honour them for navigation....
Title: Re: Gaps between tracks in music playback/chapters/options?
Post by: Marie.O on March 04, 2008, 03:22:06 pm
What about the rip file format question, and chapters/indices - any suggestions on that? OGG supports chapters but not sure if it is only for video, or if LMCE would even honour them for navigation....

Did you try to rip a CD outside of lmce using the OGG container and see what happens? First within Xine or any other audio player, and after that within LinuxMCE?

rgds
Oliver