Do you think it will happen anytime soon?

Yes. Check this out. They have two harddrive players coming out that support AAC, one with a radio and one without, and both in 10 and 20 GB size.

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/u...special_9.shtml

WEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

iRiver knows what's good.

What's really cool is that I would expect a firmware upgrade for this thing with Vorbis support as well (actually, it might even ship with it, who knows.) That would mean, MP3, OGG Vorbis, AAC, ASF, and WMA. It would be nice if this thing supported MPEG-4 (ie MPEG-4 AAC and not just MPEG-2 AAC) and MPC. But from what I've read on this board, MPC will probably never be on a consumer player. At least since the Nero MPEG-4 encoding is now gaining popularity, will definately see hardware players for MP4 in the future.

Not only Nero, but QuickTime 6 is doing a good job promoting MP4 too.

Is AAC capable of Gapless playback?

ISO AAC: no
AAC inside MP4: Maybe, I'm not sure.

And I continue to wonder why all the popular (or becoming popular) formats do not support gapless playback. That is probably the number one feature on my want list. The number two feature on my list is ReplayGain support.

man such a device would definitely pown!!!

i just hope it wont require DRM crapola

MP4 seems to be gapless to me. It works just fine in Winamp 2 and Foobar2000...

Yeah, I just used 9 of my Nero encodes for the obligatory gapless test with Pink Floyd DSOTM, and the MP4's were gapless with Winamp and the latest plugin, so there you go. Hopefully we get MP4 MPEG-4 AAC support, and not just MPEG-2 AAC support. I also "converted" some MPEG-2 AAC files to the MP4 container with Ivan & Menno, and go mixed results. I got plenty of "Gain control not yet implemented", "channel coupling not yet implemented", and "Invalid huffman codebook" error popups right before each next track played. Even so, it seemed gapless as well or almost there, as if playing of AAC files contained in MP4 just not fully implemented into the plugin yet. So, it seems like it will be a fairly easy conversion for all those AAC users out there right now once an MP4 is in a player as well. (this may vary by AAC version )


Edit: doh, It was all because of my mp3-splice plugin, hmm, I guess mp3-splice does other formats too This plugin continues to amaze me...

I listen to a 8 minutes instrumental works, segmented in 14 tracks. Encoder : Ahead mp4, VBR (-streaming / fast encoding).

Tried with winamp : consequent pops with wave_out ; little 'blurps' with mp3splice output.
Trid with foobar 0.5 : same pops.

Sometimes, it seems to be a real gapless playback encoding ; but most of the time, the pop is clearly audible, and annoying. That's a really bad new... I left mp3 for mpc one year ago mainly for the gapless issue.

I tried again, with an EAC extraction followed by a Nero encoding (in case of a buggy extraction with Nero). Same flaws.

I uploaded two consecutive tracks (500 kb). There are 34 seconds of music, the shortest possible combination. I hope this wouldn't be against the HA Term of Use.

http://membres.lycos.fr/guruboolez/temp/ga...not_gapless.arr (rename it in rar).

In that case, the problem isn't obvious : no pop, but something like a dropout. Sufficient to convice that mp4 isn't gapless. Can someone listen to it ?

EDIT : changed link ; 32 seconds now, and clearer linking problem.

hmm, I tested it both with mp3-splice and with WaveOut. Of course, with WaveOut, it was NOT gapless. With mp3-splice, I definately heard the dropout you described. But that can't be attributed to the plugin, can it? It could be some sort of normalization issue between the two audio streams, but I doubt that you normalized them and I'm sure converting to MP4 did NOT normalize them in any way. I am assuming that you own the original, and it is seamlessly gapless when played off the cd. When I played these two clips with the mp3-splice plugin I heard a drop in volume at change in tracks, and some sort of pop there, but I had other processes going on my computer stressing the decoding and processing through the plugin. So, I stopped those, and tried again, watching the dB meter and recording the WAV out. There was no imediate drop or rise of decibels there due to a pop or gap, the music was contiguous and smoothly but immediately changed volume (only about a 7 dB drop, then continuing down, seriously). The music DOES drop in overall volume there suddenly, but it is hard to tell if this is a gap or a drum being stopped by hand as the music changes. The more I listen to my recording of it, the more I seem to think it is some sort of the latter. I think this is still gapless here, and the composer of the song was just REALLY wanting to confuse us audiophiles. I am still not positive though. I can e-mail you the recording I made of the Wave output through the mp3-splice plugin if you would like.

Edit: If you listen really closely, you can hear the drums resonation as it falls to nothing seamlessly between tracks, so I don't think there is a drop in volume other than the instruments' decresendos and abrubt stop.

Oh, and btw, I've only heard 32 seconds, and I'm hooked! What is the album this is on, I need to buy it.

Thank you for testing.



I'm sorry, but wave out IS gapless, at least with winamp 2.81 (thanks to a guy named Pawlowsky Peter ). Musepack, vorbis, lossless... are gapless with winamp & waveout.



Yes, that's right. The goal of mp3splice is to provide gapless playback, and not to introduce gap where it shouldn't happen
Have you tried foobar playback ?

The tracks came from the original disc. Original disc is gapless of course, with a natural linking between two tracks, for each 14 tracks. I encoded this CD with mpc some days ago, and I can't hear anything wrong.

Nota : check your PM.

French baroque composer, called Jean-Féry Rebel (1666-1747). composition is named Les Caractères de la danse. Performer is the thundering Marc Minkowski.



Available in the states for only $10, on amazon (warning : 45 minutes only)

That's not what I meant about the WaveOut plugin. From what I read, you said that it was definately not gapless WITH MP4, and I was seconding that remark. I understand that it is gapless with other formats. It could be the resampling, but I got fairly big gaps in between the tracks with WaveOut.

As for the mp3-splice plugin comment, I know that that is what its use is for, I was just asking to make sure that the plugin couldn't alter the sound volume, thats all. Also, I always assumed that it only did its magic on mp3s, not other formats.

I am going to test foobar soon, I totally forgot to.

I tested the new ape files you sent, and I listened to them gapless first with the WaveOut plugin, and then converted them to MP4, and listened to these. I get a slight pop with WaveOut with the MP4's, and I get gapless with mp3-splice. Actually, the first ones were better to test with, as they had that wierd volume drop and abrubt change. You said that those particular ones were corrupt that you linked to before, or not?

Edit: Oh yes, my foobar isn't working for some reason, so i'll test with it sometime later this week.

Come on, you made up a secret user poll over there, didn't you? B)

I pointed them to an edited version of Filburt's famous post, changing all occurrences of WMA for AAC.

Who could deny such solid reasons?

Why does this question always pop up in a thread about AAC portables? Like I wrote elsewhere, this will be handled by the Systems part of MPEG-4 and not by AAC itself. This part of the container format MP4 has been developed for these and other purposes, so that any kind of multimedia content (not only audio) can be streamed (i.e. without gaps, but with describing side information in a "layer") from A to B, independent of the individual connection or storage properties.

So there certainly is at least one solution for this problem, but it's buried beneath tons of documents (some of them I've printed out recently) and somewhere located between BIFS (Binary Format for Scene Description) and DMIF (Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework). If you'd like to know more about this, follow the links in this Wiki page:

http://www.audiocoding.com/wiki/index.php?page=Systems

At least not iRiver... I liked the "sykoo" part best, by the way.