gapless

[adrian]

Is gapless playback possible with minimserver? Is this the responsibility of the server or of the control point? I'm wondering if it's possible or not, and if it is possible, what I have to do to make it happen. (My control point is the Olive ONE.)

[simoncn]

(21-04-2016 16:07)adrian Wrote:  Is gapless playback possible with minimserver? Is this the responsibility of the server or of the control point? I'm wondering if it's possible or not, and if it is possible, what I have to do to make it happen. (My control point is the Olive ONE.)

This is the responsibility of the renderer and control point, not the server. MinimServer supports gapless playback automatically when used with renderers and control points that provide this support.

[dgreenhbs99]

Simon,

I am not a computer scientist, so I am not sure what you mean by "control point" or "renderer". I'm trying to decide whether to install MinimServer alongside Subsonic, to enable playback of my ripped classical CDs. Subsonic doesn't support gapless playback. I don't want to rip, say, each act of Gotterdammerung, as a single track just to enable play on Subsonic. I am lazy, and want gapless playback to be automatic..i.e., if it plays gaplessly on the CD, I want it to play back that way on the server. I don't want to have to sit there, listen to the opera (or for that matter, Pink Floyd's The Wall) to determine and hand-program which tracks should be played gaplessly, and which not, as I would have to do that for over a thousand CDs; it is already a nontrivial task just to rip.

I ask you this because your web page indicated that you designed this for classical music, so you must have thought through the problem.

1) Can MinimServer do selective gapless playback? For example, if I have a CD with both Noye's Fludde and Ceremony of Carols (Britten), can the server recognize that Noye's Fludde is to be played gaplessly and Ceremony of Carols, (mostly) not? Note that some CDs play Ceremony of Carols gaplessly and some not, depending on how the music was encoded to the CD.

2) Can I rip these CDs in such a way that the music will play via MinimServer as it was encoded on the CD? i.e., can I make gapless playback "automatic" in some sense, so that I don't have to sit here and laboriously hand-program everything?

3) Can gapless playback be defined and be persistent from the server side, so that I don't have to keep reselecting which tracks should be played gaplessly on each device, each time I call up the album? I cannot predict which device or which client will call the server demanding Noye's Fludde -- but whichever does, I want playback to be gapless.

If it matters, I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, generally over System76 hardware. At the moment, I'm using the Linux-deb64 version of Subonic 6 on my Meerkat. We play back via a half dozen or so devices running Mozilla, Chrome, the Android Subsonic client, and a Subsonic compatible client on iOS.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Dan

(21-04-2016 16:38)simoncn Wrote:  

(21-04-2016 16:07)adrian Wrote:  Is gapless playback possible with minimserver? Is this the responsibility of the server or of the control point? I'm wondering if it's possible or not, and if it is possible, what I have to do to make it happen. (My control point is the Olive ONE.)

This is the responsibility of the renderer and control point, not the server. MinimServer supports gapless playback automatically when used with renderers and control points that provide this support.

[simoncn]

Gapless playback is not something that a UPnP server can control. As I said in my earlier post, it depends on the control point and the renderer.

The control point is the software that you use to browse the library and select tracks to play.

The renderer is the software and/or hardware that actually plays the music and produces sound.

Sometimes the control point and renderer are combined into a single piece of software. For example, on Android, the BubbleUPnP app includes a control point and also includes a renderer that you can use if you want to play music on the same Android device. If you want to play music on a separate streamer or DAC, you would only use the control point feature.

If the control point and renderer support gapless playback, all tracks will automatically be played gaplessly. If the tracks include silence at the beginning and/or end, this silence will be played. If the tracks don't include silence, no silence (gap) will be added.