The VideoLAN Forums

Hello,

after I have ripped my entire CD collection with a lot of mix CDs in I have the problem that vlc plays the sets without seamless transitions. That means that you will hear a really short break after every track. This does not matter while listening to an album but it is annoying for listening to a mix cd.
I have already searched the forums for "continous play" and "seamless" but all threads displayed were for video issues.

Can anybody please help me? I really appreciate it!

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

Steve

The Audio CD input would have to be patched. I think there has an open feature ticket for this for a while already but developers are busy.

Sorry for not expressing myself correctly - my fault!

I have ripped all my CDs to mp3s which are located on my harddisk. These tracks fom my harddisk, if played in a playlist, are not played seamlessly but have a very short break between the transition from one track to the other.

Cheers,

Steve

Found a thread that fits:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=42307&start=60

Will continue in this thread.

@mod: Please close this one. Sorry for opening!!!

Gapless transition would require quite a bit of work in the core code. That's unlikely to happen any time soon with the shortage of skilled developers.

Thank you very much for you reply. I have read statements like this in the above posted thread and totally understand it. If I would have the knowledge you could count me in but unfortunately I am no real programmer. Sorry!

Cheers,

Steve

VLC is not only among the best free software, it is among the best at any price.

Unfortunately, nobody wants to listen to a symphony with gaps, or even a live rock concert with gaps.

This means that VLC is brilliant in windows, but broken in Linux. I'm sad that I can no longer, after so many years, use it to play anything and everything: as an audio player in Ubuntu, I have to rate it useless.

Blunt words, yes --- but spoken in sadness, not anger. Although, I find the fact that nobody seems to have any interest in fixing this to be very frustrating? If you take linux seriously, shouldn't you make it work? Or else be like the Foobar guys, and say, sorry, Windows only, use Wine!

The problem affects all VLC-supported platforms, not just Linux.

If it's a problem for you, you're more than welcome to fix it.

Oh... I just booted Windows to check, and now I feel incredibly stupid.

Probably one of the reasons why I am not a developer.

Oh well... never mind.

What exactly would need to be done to implement gapless? And what are the architectural constraints that make this so hard? Is it the separation of VLM and VLPlaylist?

The main, but not the only problem, is the deep design limitation in the playlist to have only one item at a time. Because of that, the next item cannot be prerolled before the current one finishes. This would be absolutely required for gapless playback.

So VLC remains good for video. Not for audio, except for those few who never listen to music that is not divided into discrete tracks with silence in between them.

Aqualung solves the problem for me

I use VLC mostly for music and I have no problems. Seriously, CDs with really continuous audio tracks are the exception rather than the rule. Even opera pieces usually have silence between parts.

CDs with really continuous audio tracks are the exception

It's true that you can listen to a lot of music and never notice, but as soon as you start listening to live concert recordings or classical music then you will. There's a lot of that too. Anyway, there are players that play, continuously....

And I'm still using VLC as a video player, and appreciating it for a heap of stuff it can do.

So given that seamless playback seems a long ways off for VLC, can anyone recommend a utility to merge tracks into a single file? Please note that I need a tool that can merge 24bit/96KHz FLAC files without any loss of quality.

Cheers!

So given that seamless playback seems a long ways off for VLC, can anyone recommend a utility to merge tracks into a single file? Please note that I need a tool that can merge 24bit/96KHz FLAC files without any loss of quality.

Audacity is always good for anything that requires processing and modifying audio.

if you are using linux, there is a command-line tool called shntool. Another useful command-line tool for audio manipulation is sox, although I can't say off-hand if it does this particular task. Google will help locate and fill in the details: I do this stuff so infrequently, I have to look it up myself every time.

Sorry, I don't know if those tools are available for WIndows, or about alternatives, except of course that Audacity is cross-platform. Most of these audio conversions and manipulations are a lot easier and much faster to do with command-line utilities. The secret is, of course, to work on a copy of your files, in case you accidentally overwrite them. We've all had those Oh-No! moments.

I've been using VLC for about 5 years and it was for me until recently truly the Swiss knife of media players, but I too listen to mixed music and after an update about 8 months ago I found that VLC doesn't play even a mixed CD with gapless audio, whereas it did before that update. I tried downloading an old version of VLC but it made no difference. Since then I have been relying on Foobar 2000, which will play and convert mixed music in a seamless format.

That's not true. VLC never played gapless in its 14 years existence. Ever.