Strangely, I find that most of my classical music is streamed acceptably (not perfectly, but good enough).
Try listening to Abbey Road, or Dark Side Of The Moon, or any other album that relies on zero second time gaps between tracks with a constant beat (The most recent example I can remember would be Chemical Brothers, "Further", between track 1 and 2). That is annoying, and has been throughout the history of stream-able audio.
Why can't we get canonical track timing for albums (down to the sample) and base the playlists accurately off them?
Does anyone else have this problem, or am I doing something terribly wrong? I've come across this problem on iTunes, WMP, Spotify, VLC, Google Music, Soundcloud and pretty much any other digital audio player out there that isn't designed for production (Traktor, Serato, DAWs). The fact that Traktor and Serato get this perfectly right hints that the "consumer" products just don't really care about this problem.
Both iTunes and Spotify have perfect gapless playback for me - I wouldn't use them if not, as I listen to quite a lot of electronic mix CDs and any gap ruins the flow.
On iTunes it does depend if the source was ripped properly (e.g. with iTunes itself), some older mp3s do not have the necessary additional data for proper gapless (I believe it is due to the overlapping nature of FFT windows - each frame in the mp3 depends on the previous/next frame to fully reconstruct the audio, so the encoder has to store "extra" frames at the start and end) so these will have little glitches.
On Spotify I guess individual sources may have issues (just like a few are obviously ripped from CDs which skip!) but the Chemical Brothers transition you mentioned plays perfectly for me. Maybe check you have "crossfade tracks" disabled in Spotify's advanced settings.
Thanks for the reply, I'll do some checks, but I'm pretty sure that I have crossfade disabled in spotify, and will double check my settings in other players.
Interesting to hear "older mp3s do not have the necessary additional data". Do you happen to know when this info was introduced? Is it stored in the ID3 header, or in the actual MP3 data? Can I "losslessly" change the files to fix this?
I'm especially interested as Google Music will happily replace tracks from my (backed up) library with "matched" tracks, but it still gets the track timing slightly wrong, even when played through other media players. It doesn't seem to matter where they come from, they don't reliably play "gaplessly".
I have no idea I'm afraid, just going off a fuzzy memory. This seems to go into a lot more detail than I ever could: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Gapless_playback. There's no way to go back and fix old files, but I know iTunes has done flawless gapless (when the source files are good, e.g. ripped from CD in iTunes) for about 10 years (I remember getting the firmware update on my black iPod video, ahhh now that was a beautiful looking bit of kit! Not very waterproof as it turns out though...)
Google Music doesn't play gapless properly, which is incredibly annoying, and indeed I struggled to get any player on Android to play gapless as well as iTunes. Poweramp was the closest I could find. Ended up going back to iPhone for that and other reasons. Not sure how iTunes Match handles gapless as I could never get it to upload my library properly, never mind play it back...
I still feel there is a big gap in the market for a really good cloud music repository. Hopefully Spotify can get in to that space, their player is the best out of the ones I've tried (though still a lot of room for improvement). I did try using Subsonic briefly but the clients were horrible.
Also see my reply above for an example of an album that plays seamlessly for me in Spotify. It may just be that I have got lucky, to be fair quite a lot of the mix CDs I listen to on Spotify are uploaded as one single hour-plus long track so would always be gapless.
House, techno, general electronic stuff. Here's an example of an (excellent) mix album split into tracks that plays perfectly for me: https://open.spotify.com/album/4ZYcd1FAY9GjtIphGqL4Ot (and I mean perfectly, I'm pretty anal about these things ;))
Try listening to Abbey Road, or Dark Side Of The Moon, or any other album that relies on zero second time gaps between tracks with a constant beat (The most recent example I can remember would be Chemical Brothers, "Further", between track 1 and 2). That is annoying, and has been throughout the history of stream-able audio.
Why can't we get canonical track timing for albums (down to the sample) and base the playlists accurately off them?
Does anyone else have this problem, or am I doing something terribly wrong? I've come across this problem on iTunes, WMP, Spotify, VLC, Google Music, Soundcloud and pretty much any other digital audio player out there that isn't designed for production (Traktor, Serato, DAWs). The fact that Traktor and Serato get this perfectly right hints that the "consumer" products just don't really care about this problem.