ASIO4ALL, gapless playback & MediaMonkey

[DavidJPettifor]

Does anyone know why the gapless feature of the ASIO4ALL plugin doesn't work with MediaMonkey or better still, how to get it working?

 

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djp

 

[Lizard_King]

Works for me using J. River Media Center, a superior program to all.

 

[DavidJPettifor]

Interesting Lizard_King. I'll have to checkout J. River Media Center.

 

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djp

 

[ade_compaud]

Just bought an ibasso D3 usb dac/headphone amp which I'm planning to use with XP at work (Macbook at home so no probs).

 

I want to use my ipod as a hard drive, connect that to the pc, then play back out through the dac / heaphones.

 

I tried Foobar, MediaMonkey and J River Media Center/Jukebox. I discounted Foobar as the ipod plugin has no playlist support. MediaMonkey with Asio_Out / Asio4All sounded great, unfortunately I couldn't get gapless to work, also it seems to hang between tracks (ipod). J River seems to work the way I want using the ipod/pc/dac although I'm not sure I can hear a difference between Asio4All and DirectSound, anyway it's sounding pretty good

 

Lizard_King what are the optimal settings for Media Center / Asio / XP and is there a difference between Media Center and Media Jukebox?

 

Thanks

 

[audiozorro]

I’m not sure whether MediaMonkey handles gapless playback or whether I don’t have it configured properly, but I am also having problems with gapless playback.

 

For instance the tracks from the Gladiator Soundtrack, 1. Progeny; 2. The Wheat; 3. The Battle, are supposed to be a continuous play, but with MediaMonkey there is a gap at the end of each track. iTunes plays these tracks perfectly, like a cd player, without any pause or gap.

 

Perhaps this is some limitation I may have to accept with MediaMonkey. Fortunately this is not a big problem since the objectionable occurrences are small in number.

 

During my research on the web I came across the below post but it is over two years old.

 

[ by JimX on Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:57 am

Gapless playback is very important to me. Many of the albums I play in MediaMonkey are DJ mixes or live sets where gapless playback is what is wanted, but others are regular albums where a couple seconds of silence between tracks is preferable. Standalone CD players deal with gapless playback of CD audio files without difficulty - tracks where a pause is wanted have a couple of seconds of silence tacked on the beginning and/or end; if there's no silence, the next track plays immediately without any noticeable gap.

 

It seems to be difficult to achieve this with software players and digital audio files like mp3s for some reason. Like many other major players, MM can't play the two-second pause on tracks that have them without also creating a tiny but noticeable "seam" between tracks that don't have the silence (a very slight pause, hesitation, click, skip or whatever).

 

I'm currently achieving the gapless playback by tweaking the DirectSound plugin as explained here:

http://www.mediamonkey.com/faq/index.ph ... ht=gapless

 

This method works very well at reducing the "seam" to nothing, but at the cost of taking out all silence at the beginning and end of tracks that should have it. The result is that live mixes play great, but albums where a brief silence between tracks is preferable have no silence. The effect is almost as jarring in some cases as it is in live mixes when a gap appears.

 

My wish would be for a gapless playback that emulates standalone CD player behaviour, where playback is seamless for continuous mixes and has silence between tracks where you would hear silence on the CD. If this is truly impossible in a software audio player (and I don't think it is, since iTunes behaves like a standalone CD player out of the box), then I would like to be able to choose between gapless playback (as configured in DirectSound) and non-gapless more easily - ideally by being able to set gapless or non-gapless as a parameter on an album by album basis, or with a simple toggle switch in the main interface.

 

I originally posted this as a request for help scripting the toggle, but it now seems more likely that this would be a change the developers would have to implement.

 

Any of the following would make me extremely happy (I'm already extremely happy with MM Gold, but no reason not to be happier):

 

1.

Make the next version of MediaMonkey behave like iTunes and standalone CD players when it comes to gapless playback.

 

2.

Add scripting objects (requested by others for other reasons) so that one's scripts can do "hot" resets of the program (rewrite INI file, re-read INI file, re-initialize plugin without restarting MM).

 

3.

Add scripting objects that give access to whatever program components are affected when one tweaks DirectSound's setting manually through the Options panel.

 

4.

Add "presets" to Options panel and then allow these to be set for albums, songs, or whatever in the library.

 

I love MediaMonkey and will continue to use it, but this is a serious drawback of the program for me, and one that must be important to many other users, especially those interested in DJ and producer music, where having to choose between always a seam or never a seam is a real aesthetic dilemma.

 

Thank you!

JimX ]