[flac-dev] Gapless Support

[Declan Kelly]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 02:19:00AM +0400, lrn1986 at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> A word of caution:

> 1) CUE sheets don't support timestamps past 99 minutes 59 seconds. Not
> a problem for audio CDs, but for bigger media it might be an issue.

Most bigger media (DVD, BD, etc) have already "solved" that problem by
not relying on having a single CUE sheet, instead having a layout of
files in folders (or chapters, or whatever) that isn't a 1-dimensional
"follow one groove from start to finish" approach.

> 2) GStreamer (which is something you might have to use as a multimedia
> framework for playing audio, if you're developing free software, or
> even proprietary software for some platforms) doesn't support CUE
> sheets natively, and i don't really recall any frameworks that do (not
> that i know that many...). CUE sheet support has to be implemented on
> top of the framework, and might not be as straightforward as it sounds
> (especially if you want to also have gapless playback). Clementine
> audio player, for example, still can't get CUE sheets right, and
> QuodLibet audio player doesn't support them at all.

On an almost daily basis, I listen to FLAC files using one of these:
* 2009-vintage Nokia (Symbian OS) with the FolderPlay app.
* Sansa Fuze v2 (not the Fuze+) running Rockbox.

Both play FLAC files gapless, and while FolderPlay claims to support CUE
files I have not been able to make it work with them.
If I'm not mobile, I generally use vlc for music playback.

FolderPlay (not to be confused with Folder Player for Android) used to
be hosted on SourceForge until the lack of source code caused it to be
removed. It seems to be back now, however, with source.

I have yet to come across a player that I can reliably use with single
track FLAC albums, either with embedded CUE or a separate CUE file.
So I either rip from CD to per-track files, or split out single track
FLAC album archives to individual tracks.

Buying music online is almost always per-track, and usually an album is
packaged as 1 ZIP file containing all the tracks (as MP3 or FLAC or
whatever was chosen). Bandcamp and MusicGlue (to name just 2) do it that
way. So there isn't much room for "bonus track" trickery with online
releases.

The OST album of the recent David Fincher movie was released initially
as a 6-track sampler (online only) then as a full album with 39 tracks
adding up to almost 3 hours.
Digital release was one ZIP file containing the 39 tracks (in a choice
of formats, including FLAC, but not exceeding 16/44.1 resolution) and
for physical release the album was split across 3 CDs or 6 vinyl discs.

-- 
-Dec.
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"Mosaic is going to be on every computer in the world." - Marc Andreessen, 1994