Media Monkey?

Hi George, it seems MediaMonkey still does not have a perfect gapless solution built in. There are some partial "patches" reported at its forum though,

I think J.River doesn't suffer from this,

If you think that Itunes is exemplary in this on a Mac, is there a problem with the same on a Windows computer?

George,

iTunes works on a PC.

George

Try Foobar200, it supports gapless, and is a great simple, fussfree program.

Of course itunes also works on a pc, but had vastly inferior sound quality due to its lack of asio support.

iTunes will be my next experiment. I know it works on a MAC, and I simply want something easy to use!

It's all experiment at this stage, and no harm in that, but some of the things like EAC and Media Monkey simply don't work without a lot more than I can offer in terms of driving a computer!

I can keep an old Volvo 240 going for ten years with superb reliability and minimal cost, I can work a CD player till the transport dies, but give me a computer, and well ... as I once noted, computers and me blend like oil and water ... only a horrible gue results!

ATB from George

For you, I'll break the silence. Go to tools, options, ouput plugins, select waveOut output 2.02a, then select configure on the right and uncheck 'enable' volume control. The PC main volume control will still function. One track will start instantly as in a very small fraction of a second at the end of the previous. Not technically gapless but I think you'll find it more than acceptable. Gapless is one of the things that you'd want to defeat in a best quality scenario regardless of player. At least I would.

I suspect that you're in MediaMonkey direct sound mode with fade options etc. enabled. WaveOut is the best non-ASIO mode and the defaults will work as you desire. There are also some nice skins availble for different looks like 'blue glass' which I use but there are many to choose from. Itunes is fine as a non asio player but doesn't like to import wave file data. I like ASIO for a # of reasons but it takes even more set up but you don't have to choose the bit or sample rate on the output. Plays them native without any manipulation or OS mixer in line. Of course it's not usable without a special sound card or outboard device.

For ease of ripping DBproweramp is the way to go. Free trial with 'perfectMeta' which is a small fee after the trial but is very simple in use. MM imports the wave file complete with art and info without a hitch. Same end result as EAC but friendlier interface and data attachment.

Dear JS,

I am a hopeless case.

Thanks for your help.

I will try it, through for replay of live recordings, then gapless is really crucial as often a three quarter of an hour section may be tracked up in many sections.

Sorry that I sounded so grumpy in the first post. Really that was from disappointment.

ATB from George

In the configure panel when you select waveOut, there will be a slider that says buffer-ahead on track change. Set it to 0 as it's not always needed and see if that does the trick. Directsound plugin has a remove silence position that is the gapless setting that you can also try. Uncheck everything else except hardware acceleration and really, you probably don't need that either.

quote:

Originally posted by js:
For you, I'll break the silence. Go to tools, options, ouput plugins, select waveOut output 2.02a, then select configure on the right and uncheck 'enable' volume control. The PC main volume control will still function. One track will start instantly as in a very small fraction of a second at the end of the previous. Not technically gapless but I think you'll find it more than acceptable. Gapless is one of the things that you'd want to defeat in a best quality scenario regardless of player. At least I would.

I suspect that you're in MediaMonkey direct sound mode with fade options etc. enabled. WaveOut is the best non-ASIO mode and the defaults will work as you desire. There are also some nice skins availble for different looks like 'blue glass' which I use but there are many to choose from. Itunes is fine as a non asio player but doesn't like to import wave file data. I like ASIO for a # of reasons but it takes even more set up but you don't have to choose the bit or sample rate on the output. Plays them native without any manipulation or OS mixer in line. Of course it's not usable without a special sound card or outboard device.

For ease of ripping DBproweramp is the way to go. Free trial with 'perfectMeta' which is a small fee after the trial but is very simple in use. MM imports the wave file complete with art and info without a hitch. Same end result as EAC but friendlier interface and data attachment.

Nice, if anyone has a solution it would have been you js.

scott

quote:

Gapless is one of the things that you'd want to defeat in a best quality scenario regardless of player. At least I would.

Hi JS,

Gapless is important for many who want their classical movements to continue without a pause. Are you saying that despite all the error correction attributes of these lauded rippers, they produce their own errors?

Keith

Nothing to do with the rips which are excellent on proper EAC and DBpoweramp. The CD players are instructed to play gapless and the rippers rip as seperate tracks. They're still bit correct.

I've stated my case about added buffering in the past. In theory it can work but in practice is audible. I don't want to go here as the system has to be top notch to pick up some of these things. ASIO drivers also don't have these options. We have posts here where everybody agrees on where Itunes sounds a bit different at 16 and 24 bit out when the signal is less processed by just adding 0s to the word length yet this is always questioned.

I understand why gapless is important and is why I also mentioned the directsound out which does have a gapless setting. MM is not better than Itunes less the ASIO capability but I really do like having that option which, for me, is fundamentally better.

I fully understand why, in theory, much of this should make no difference but I listen first and assume that I don't know everthing.

I can tell you that even a Nagra 6, which is a better source than any computer, has a preview circuit for recording that allows you to start the recording after you hear the first sound. Very useful but we don't use it. Bit perfect through a 1 sec buffer that is unfortunately audible. This was discovered by a test dub just not being quite good enough which in this case means not quite as good as an analog Nagra 4 to Nagra 4 dub. Had that digital dulling/smoothing that can happen. Once the preview circuit was defeated, the 6 made a slightly better dub than the 4. The buffer is absolutely bit perfect and absolutely audible. Of course it's being used with top Naim ware and 1st generation sources but there's more to get right than many want to admit or are aware of. There are greater oddities than these in a digital chain.
Ever notice that Naim players don't handle badly scratched CD's as well as cheap players. I don't know this for a fact but I suspect they use a smaller required buffer on playback for sonic reasons. Making them almost skip proof would be easy but probably at a price. There's a lot of little things to get right that requires listening.

I'm off again as this is going off topic which wasn't my intent but you asked.

Dear JS,

I will make further experiments and contact you pirvately as things settle.

I was not wanting to start a war on different methods, as I am sure you would realise.

Thanks for your detailed advice that will form the basis for my next move.

Cheers from George

George,

iTunes can give superb results on a PC running XP. The trouble is that unlike a MAC the results won't be that great unless some basic setup rules are adhered to. Luckily those nice people at Benchmark have provided a wiki with easy to follow instuctions to get your computer audio (of almost any variety) working properly.

I followed their instructions and my XP PC streaming iTunes gives little or nothing away to a macbook we have tried. Look here
for info on setting up XP audio. Then look here for info on setting up iTunes-Quicktime for windows.

Give it a go - it could save you the price of a macbook.

Mr Tibbs

This Forum is so kind!

Thanks for all you suggestions - especially Mr JS and Mr Tibbs.

ATB from George

George,

While I know that people rave about the Mac vs. PC. There are an equal number who feel that the pc does a better job, but requires more set-up than the Mac.

If you can get a hold of a TC Konnekt K8 between your pc and da-10 that will improve things as you've seen mentioned for about $300USD. A nice improvement and cheaper than a Mac. If you ever go this route I'm sure JS will guide you throught he correct set-up.

George.

Foobar2000 PERIOD.

iTunes is for kids... Or buying 128kbps mp3s.

And without question EAC for rips. In order to get perfect gap detection, and pre-gap tracks/info, i.e. ALL of the music/info on the disc; a sure way is to use EAC.

I do not think iTunes can handle pre-track gaps (songs/notes/sounds before a track starts). And I am not completely sure it is "truly" gapless playback either.

I KNOW it cannot handle pre-emphasis, cannot rip to FLAC, will NOT produce an error-log, does not creat a cue sheet....etc...

Stick with EAC/Foobar and you cannot go wrong.

EAC for rips
Foobar2000 for playback and converting to MP3 for your friend's iPod.

Foobar is so strong it is stupid.

It is Free, Ultra Fast, tiny program, uses basically no resources, FULLY supported, very popular, great forum etc...

I have now over 75,000 songs, in one playlist, without .00001% drop in performance.

Moving between, creating, searching and navigating your library and playlists is so fast and smooth.

Reimporting all of the songs, which I did last night after managing my library a bit, took 10 minutes for 3 drives worth of 75K songs totaling over 2.5 TBs. Ridiculous.

I couldn't get iTunes to import half of them without critical errors, freezing, memory issues etc... When i converted to ALAC and performed a test.

It cannot handle a decent sized library.

Also, iTunes is completely confusing regarding duplicates, iTunes libraries, tagging, etc..

I really do not understand why people think it is so intuitive.

2cents

Peter, which version of Foobar are you using. I recently upgraded to .9.6.2 and had nothing but issues. Right now I have 800+ mb on a USB drive connected to an Apple Airport Extreme.

The problem is this: if Foobar loads and the network drive is not mounted, the program kills all the library settings and rescans--which takes hours. Thus the program is essentially unusable. Prior to the automatic scanning, it worked fine.

hmmmm.

sounds like an Apple Airport issue to be honest.

"mounted" what is that?
"library settings" in what?
"rescans" what are you talking about?
"takes hours" what does?

I can reimport my entire life of music in ten minutes. 2.5 tb.

something else is going on.

Well that is impressive PCS, you must have cores of glass fibre delivering your network and I bow down to you sir!

Eric your problem is not unusual Infact iTunes used to be the same if it could not find your preferred library it would recreate anew one in the default location requiring the user to re point to the network library and have to reimport. I had it too.

Search out 'hard alias' to see if you can work it this way.

Otherwise use itunes. If you can live with not knowing the pre track information for the 6 cds out there that have it of course.

If you remove a drive files are on, then try to play in foobar, it will say "cannot find file" then skip to the next one it can find.

If you have everything on one drive, it would play nothing, if that drive was off/disconnected/"unmounted".

Now, if you plug it back in, Foobar will play them instantly. Well as fast as the drive makes them available.

No need to re-import anything, or re-load anything.....

I imagine the Apple Thing stops looking at the USB drive, and it needs to retold it is there.... or something.

Nothing is going on with Foobar.

And garyi, I have hundreds of CDs with pre-track info, care for me to list them?

oh and I dont do anything wireless for music. Except for my iPhone controlling Foobar.

My tower has a wireless card, my router is in another room.

Just e-Sata drives and a tower. USB out to DAC. drives are silent, PC is silent from 3 feet.

Not my screen shot mind you.... good lord.

Peter,

My files are on a network drive. Network drives need to be "mounted" to be seen. This happens on startup. However, if the network connection is lost and regained, the drive may need to be "remounted."

So foobar is set up with Z:\music as its library. But if for some reason z: doesn't show up (due to a dropped connection at some point), it erases my library and media viewer settings. Then, once I "remount" the drive, I have to close and reopen foobar, and when I do so, it needs to rescan the entire library. Because this is on a shared drive, it takes hours. It would be much shorter if directly connected.

The problem is directly analagous to what was described with itunes above, except itunes has fixed it. It keeps you library and if you try to play a file that it can't find, it just puts a symbol besides it and asks if you want to find the file. Then I remount the drive (just a couple of clicks) and off we go.

By the way, I just want to reiterate, something IS going on with .9.6.2 foobar. You don't mention what version you are using. There are others with the same complaints on their forum.

In old versions, if I started up foobar and it couldn't find my library, no problem. Now, problem.

Garyi,

You say "iTunes used to be the same". I find that it still is. My music is on my TimeCapsule, and if I turn my MacBook off then on again, iTunes "loses" it (goes back to default folder) until I reassign the directory in iTunes. Is there a setting to lock the assigned drive/folder in iTunes?

Thanks in advance...

Winky

That is bizarre. I am running same version. I just unplugged the sata cable on my external HD. Wont play in Foobar, obviously.

But nothing has disappeared. It is still there. No need to "Add Folders". I would post some screen shots and try to help you out, but I think that be best left for another forum.

That is how you add your music to a playlist right? "Add folders"???