audio gapless playback and cue sheet support

[adamlogan]

Sure thing, It's the least I can do. I really like VLC it seems to be improving all the time. It will take a little while to upload single file cues as my connection is incredibly slow (11 k/s). I'll get an album onto dropbox then pm you the link? 7zip ok? Uploading a flac single file w/ cue and album art embedded. Once you grab that I'll replace it with the same album but .ogg format. (only got 2gb of space)

[adamlogan]

Ok finished uploading first example. Classic large single file album + cue + embedded image. To whom/where should I provide the link?

[VLC_help]

ftp://ftp.videolan.org/incoming/ is one place

[adamlogan]

60 K down and 30K up. Got the single file flac uploaded, the single file ogg vorbis version is on it's way now. Took a little while for me to find out about nohup so I could get it uploaded and let other users log in & out of accounts without hanging up my upload, but I did and am happy for it. =). I'm going to be away for about a week. When I get back I suppose I could upload individual tracks w/ cue sheet.

[rogerdpack]

you could concatenate all the files you wanted to play "seamlessly together" I suppose...

[adamlogan]

@ rogerdpack

I doubt VLC would know what to do with concatenated files dude, and that sounds like a really dirty hack; be cool if it worked but still. Doubt mp3 players would be able to play them either. Single file albums with cue, even multi file w/ cue are pretty standard. Exceptional .Cue support would mean being able to interact with the "tracks" in the big single file w/ cue as if it were a real album, being able to skip tracks, having track info show up such as track name, artist, album, track number, genre etc, being able to re-arrange the order the songs play in the playlist.. Not much else comes to mind, but you get the idea.

[rogerdpack]

true VLC doesn't concatenate well. http://wiki.videolan.org/How_to_merge_a ... ple_videos lists some other programs that "might concatenate better"
barring that you could use VLC to transcode them to something that "does" concatenate well (i.e. if you just stick the files together, it works, like MPG).
GL!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Still waiting for some cue files unsupported by vlc.

[adamlogan]

@ j-b

I don't think I was clear in previous posts. I'll try again.

The single file flac and vorbis album files I sent you will play with VLC, but the cue file is ignored. The file plays as if it is one track, technically this is accurate it is just one big audio file, but people with one file albums with cue embedded or alongside the audio file generally want the media player to act as if the single file album is a real album with many tracks. Being able to skip between tracks and see artist album track name for each song is important. The way VLC is not it is like watching a VHS film with no "chapters", it sucks when you want to pick up where you left off, or get to your favorite scene in the movie.

There is a FOSS audio player that is inspired by foobar2000 called DeadBeeF, I never used foobar2000 so I don't know what I missed as I've been using the Mac OS mostly in the last 4 years or so using COG or VOX. Apparently DeadBeeF is amazing in supporting .cue file and most of the music formats. In my tests DeadBeeF played single file albums with cue perfectly in mp3lame, wavpack, flac, alac, vorbis (aoTuv) formats, my guess is it will do other formats as well such as aac wav and so on. DeadBeeF has got the wow factor too, you can re-order the "tracks" of the single file album on the fly while music is playing and use all the regular playback functions like shuffle, random, loop, mix tracks among several single file albums, it is very robust and lightweight.

The program is released under a GNU 2 license, thinking VLC devs could look at the source code and perhaps use some of it. http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

I have seen the .ogg and .flac, but not the .cue file.

[praXis]

Definitely need better CUE support.

I renounced of Winamp to use VLC for both music and video, and only thing that I miss is the CUE playing.

Problems that I see with CUE playing:
- if i play a CUE file of a large MP3 when jumping from one track (tracks defined by CUE) to another there is a gap in sound, it should continue flawlessly, like if I were to play directly the MP3
- the same problem with title and artist as mentioned above
- the scrolling bar at the bottom showing the length should show the length of the current track and not the complete MP3

Uploaded a jpeg to the public FTP.

[rogerdpack]

re: gapless: if it's audio maybe you can have sox just combine all the songs into one?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Definitely need better CUE support.

I renounced of Winamp to use VLC for both music and video, and only thing that I miss is the CUE playing.

Problems that I see with CUE playing:
- if i play a CUE file of a large MP3 when jumping from one track (tracks defined by CUE) to another there is a gap in sound, it should continue flawlessly, like if I were to play directly the MP3
- the same problem with title and artist as mentioned above
- the scrolling bar at the bottom showing the length should show the length of the current track and not the complete MP3

Uploaded a jpeg to the public FTP.

Can you share a cue+mp3+all_other_things in a zip in our ftp, please?

[Blackbrook]

Another one with the wish of gapless audio playback. I am not sure in how far it is implemented or where it is on the developer's list. Is it still on the list or already deleted? I appreciate that all of you work on the code in your free time!

Cheers,

Steve

[cpm]

Hello everyone.

I recently copied a mixed audio CD to FLAC format, creating a single (gapless) FLAC file plus some cue sheet (created with EAC). I experienced the following issues with VLC playback:

1) FLAC files may include an optional cue list attached, which is not currently supported by VLC. Such cue markers are usually created when encoding, using --cuesheet=file.cue. Note these markers are offset/timestamps and do not contain any tags for track title/name/etc.

2) Playing a FLAC file from a cue sheet always introduces short gaps between tracks, while playing the FLAC file alone does not.

3) Skipping from one track to another by user request (i.e. clicking on another track from cue playlist) does not seek to the exact point. FLAC seek points stored in file won't match those of cue file, usually. Still, I believe you may get this data from attached cue markers in FLAC file (see 1), or else from file prescan.

4) ARTIST tag from FLAC file overwrites PERFORMER tag for each track defined in cue file.

5) Progress (playback) bar represents the timing for the entire FLAC file, not current track. Such duration is listed for every track in playlist as well, so there's no way to know elapsed/remaining time of current playing track.

[VLC_help]

2. VLC doesn't support gapless track changes.
3. One possible reason might be that FLAC duration is calculated incorrectly. If that is so, any seeking operations will find wrong spot.
4. Yes, since VLC prefers file metadata over playlist metadata.
5. Yes, current design doesn't actually limit the playback range, it only sets start and end points.

[cpm]

2. this is a particular case, where one track follows another in the same stream. it wouldn't be needed to switch to another track, but simply keep playing and update position in playlist and metadata. however i am not aware of how vlc works internally whatsoever.

3. flac is vbr and still duration is calculated correctly, from flac streaminfo data, i presume.

4. the same principle doesn't hold for track titles

[FunkyMonkey]

As far as metadata conflicts, you can edit the metadata in the Flac file and remove the track reference which is read from the title info in the Flac metadata; VLC will then default to track names from the cue file. A good metadata editor is Mp3tag which supports ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags and is available here:
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html