Hi all, How many of you use iOS devices to listen to dj sets / live albums? For me, the main reason for starting to use an iPhone was so that I could listen to my music with gapless playback, cant listen to split up dj sets with a pause between each track right? Well, now it seems that gapless playback on iOS devices is broken now. There's an intermittent bug that I found ages ago that still hasn't been fixed in iOS 8. This only happens on my iPhone and using iOS, this bug is not found when I use my iPod classic or when playing the same albums through iTunes. I thought it might have been spotted by other iOS users and fixed in iOS 7.1 or at least the current version of iOS 8, but instead it's gotten worse, albums that used to play smoothly between transitions now suddenly pause and jump for a split second when changing from track to track. What's happening is, I listen to a lot of albums that are continuously dj mixed and play straight through without any pauses between tracks, and I've been experiencing problems a lot now with random split second pauses between tracks and choppy transitions. These albums in question have been ripped from cd using the latest versions of iTunes. For example, I'd be listening to an album and it would play gapless and smooth for most of the album, but maybe one or two transitions on the album would have a split second pause between them, and the rest of the album would play perfectly with no pauses, skips or jumps at all. I've been mailing apple about this and been on the phone to them about it, but they wouldn't acknowledge the problem at first, then they said they heard what I was talking about and would look into it and fix it in a coming update, that was months ago. So I called them again a few weeks ago to see if they can sort it yet and now they saying that they don't support gapless playback anymore, or at least they think they don't? I think this is total BS, and really found it hard to believe that this was the case, Apple stopping supporting their music player on iOS devices. Seeing as iTunes plays everything smoothly and no gapless issues. I just went out and bought an iPhone 6 for 900 / $1060, and for that money you'd expect it's basic music player to work. It's total BS to think that a top computer software / hardware company would just decide to abandon basic functions in their devices, especially when we are talking about how much Apple takes pride in their products and how much more they charge for them over their competitors. So this is my next step to try and get this problem seen and out in the open more. The more people who know about it and are aware of the issue, the better.Hopefully more people can get the word around and get this noticed by Apple and finally fixed. I've uploaded some test files below to show the problem. The files are mp3's and aac, and have been ripped from cd using the latest version of iTunes. The mp3's are the ones with the issue, but the aac play with no problem. If you listen to the transition at the end of track 2 (2-02 Colours (JH Re-Edit)) going into the start of track 3 (2-03 Your Body), you will notice the split second pause / jump. But listen to the aac version and compare it to the mp3 version and you will hear that it plays back fine, just as it's supposed to. Try them in iTunes too and both versions playback fine, no jumps or pauses. You can download them here, all links have the same files, I just uploaded them to different hosts for other people's choosing... http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=86512332626247919914 https://www.mediafire.com/?w5wvi50er96b14s http://www42.zippyshare.com/v/37047710/file.html https://www.sendspace.com/file/lubcmc I really hope that people can spot this issue too and help get this fixed, I know this gapless playback feature might not be important to some people, but like I said at the start, it's an essential function for me in a music player and I use it on a daily basis when I listen to music. And I thought I'd see how many people here would use it too. Thanks for reading this long rant of mine, appreciate it.
There's your problem. Apple doesn't official support mp3 gapless playback only ALAC and AAC. This isn't really an Apple issue, mp3 never supported gapless on mp3 until LAME codex even which is more or less a slap-on that needs to be updated every time Apple changes their iTunes coding. Apple's not going to try and support a 20+ year old codex let alone one that is directly in competition of their own supported one.
Yeah, but how come gapless playback isn't ok on iTunes? And it works 70% of the time on iOS devices at the moment. I could get a basic android phone and have a selection of apps from the Google play store that all support gapless playback. Makes no sense that apple make themselves out to be so cutting edge and on top of their game, yet drop basic functions of their music player?
Doesnt seem a huge issue to me, i've got a fair few 'dance' songs on my iphone and yeah theres a 'slight' gap between each one but no biggie You should try downloading some different apps to listen to music, i listen to a lot of audio books and you dont hear the gap between each tiny mp3. Audiobooks often are loads of small mp3's, if there was a gap between each file it would get annoying. But i dont really stick to Apples standard apps like Music or their Podcast app as they're not that good
I have most of my old 12s on MP3 and tend to mix (or at least try to mix) them myself on mixing apps. I haven't listened to a mix Album for years but I do know that when I used to download MP3 mix albums as separate tracks and there was that slight gap it was very, very annoying. Proper dj'ing is all about the blend and that gap can really mess with it. Don't have any real suggestions except yep, it's rubbish, but shouldn't stop you from mixing it up yourself.
One of the apps I still miss most on IOS is cue play DJ I did pick up Cross DJ on Android and it's almost there but not quite. Anyway best answer I can give you to your gapless thing is ripping the album to one continous mp3 file I'm not sure if that article will help or not but it's my best guess at resolving it.
Yeah, I've looked into all this before, and gapless actually works on the iOS devices, it's just the fact that there's an intermittent bug in the music player software now that apple won't bother to fix. I know on android, there's loads of different music apps I could get from the Google play store that all support gapless playback and work perfectly. Just none for apple devices. I've been talking to apple on the phone earlier and the guy said to get this problem fixed, more people have to contact them about it and let them know that gapless playback isn't working anymore and they need to start supporting it on the current iOS devices and the more people that contact them, the quicker it gets fixed. Can you take a minute and drop them a mail here at the support page about it... https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html Pass it on, the more that knows about it the better. Thanks
I just wanted to say that gapless playback is working for AAC just not the hacky MP3 version that LAME has tried to implement. Considering the number of people using iTunes for music I doubt this will be escalated, Apple has lots more pressing with their iOS music player then supporting LAME.
