I have been trying a number of music players under Linux (Ubuntu 8.09), and had no luck gettting gapless playback to work with my Nero AAC files. I tried mpd but its gapless playback feature only works on opensource codecs and LAME Mp3. I gave Amarok another go since I did managed to get gapless with Nero AAC with Amarok on some Linux distro many months ago, sadly its broken on Ubuntu 8.09 by cutting first 1 - 2 secs (alot worse then having gaps) with AAC files, but with no gaps though.

Aqualung latest release and builds. Everything is gapless. I am running latest on debian though Ubuntu is still stuck with the older version, But I think it should also work if it was compiled with ffmpeg.

I tried it on Ubuntu which was an older built just like you said, gapless works with LAME but not with AAC and it crashes if configure it i.e enable ReplayGain. But I will uninstall the Ubuntu repo version and compile the latest version, since this player has features that meets my needs without running a daemon e.g mpd and xmms2.

I tried it with Aqualung R-1061 official debian package - Gapless works but I can't read tags for some reason.

As a regular reader of hydrogenaudio, I thought I would finally join and post.

I have been through the same problem of 'gapless in Linux'. I couldn't believe the lack of interest in such an important area. I spent several days last week and tried most players. The gapless players I have found and tested are:

1. Aqualung. Works 100% gapless
2. Audacious with the cross-fade plugin. It works well, not to be confused with Rhythmbox's terrible cross-fade feature)
3. Songbird 1.11 is now gapless and works very well.

The reason for the lack of gapless support in most players is gstreamer. A solution has been developed - 'playbin2', and it seems like Quod Libet player is the nearest to implementing it in a future release. Hopefully many more will follow.

I hope this helps

I compiled the latest svn build of Aqualung (R-1065), gapless playback does not work all at all even with LAME mp3s (a slight gap) and tags still don't display with AAC files. Maybe I did something wrong?

Aqualung had an old bug with mp3 gaps that was fixed months ago. Sometimes though I hear a 'blip' or pop only on some tracks with MPD as well - only on MP3, FLAC / WV are always perfect.

Welcome to Hydrogenaudio.



My friend also mentioned somthing about this Audacious cross-fade plugin, I'll have to give it a try.



Songbird supports gapless now?



As Francis from Left 4 Dead would say: "I hate GStreamer"



Thanks for the advice, I'll try Songbird. But I never had any problems with getting gapless on LAME Mp3s, but sometimes it was hit and miss, but archiving gapless with AAC seems to be a real PITA.



I never heard any blips or pops on my old mp3s when I used mpd last year, but i did'nt use mpd much though.

@ /mnt. Thanks for the welcome.

I've been playing with some Nero encoded files this evening, as well as Lame 3.98.2 and latest Aotuv ogg files. Findings:

Songbird 1.1.1: Lame and Ogg Vorbis play gaplessly. Nero aac sadly doesn't
Audacious with the cross-fade plugin: All of the above are gapless.

If you're just in need of a player, rather than a jukebox style solution, Audacious is great - good sound quality too.

For me, as I prefer a jukebox style player, Aotuv ogg files with Songbird works well. SB is still a bit rough around the edges but the development is coming along nicely after a slow start. One big one for me is that the Album replaygain option works superbly in SB using the vorbis comments. Lame mp3s replaygain too, but you need to make sure to tag the replaygain files with id3, and not APE tags, so that would require Foobar or dbPoweramp with wine.

It's just a shame about Nero files as I love the quality/size. At least Audacious works

Ok, I’ve been waiting for Quod Libet to finally implement gapless playback for ages and it never happened mostly because development had been stalled for long. But now people appeared to pick it up[1] and there’s even a gapless patch in the bugtracker[2] that works 100% on the usual formats. If you feel comfortable with patching then you should ceratinly give it a try. QL is written in Python, so no recompilation is necessary. It looks like the next release under the new maintainer will have this patch merged. Myself, I just couldn’t wait. And it works.




[1] http://groups.google.com/group/quod-libet-...db09e8d1aff7505

[2] http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/issues/detail?id=49