I'm amazed I can't find this in the FAQ... maybe I missed it, in which case, sorry in advance.  Anyhow...

I have many albums (Beethoven symphonies, Powaqqatsi soundtrack, John Taverner's The Protecting Veil, etc. etc.) which feature music playing continuously from one track to another.  When I play the CD, obviously it just plays smoothly.  But when I rip to MP3 and play in Amarok, I get a loud click between tracks, which is annoying to say the least.

Is there some way I can get Amarok to play this music smoothly?  Obviously I could rip the CD to a single track, but then I'd lose navigation, which would suck.  Would alternate encoding options help?  Ripping to OGG? 

Cheers,

Ian

Yes, don't rip to MP3. Use OGG or Flac instead. MP3 is inherently unsuitable for gapless playback.

Thank you!  I'll give it a whirl -- I'm just starting the process of OGG-ifying my (huge) collection anyhow; I was wondering if that would help with the click prob.  Shame I'll still have to convert back to MP3 for my music player 

Ian

Well, I tried OGG, and it seemed to be not so bad, but I still get clicks and/or pauses at the track changeover.

Any other ideas?

I don't really want to use FLAC, since I'd rather keep my collection on one hard drive...

I have not tried this in Amarok, let me know how you get on........
An old trick that pro. audio editors use is the small duration crossfade.
Try going to SETTINGS, CONFIGURE AMAROK, PLAYBACK....
Set to use a cross-fade with a very small duration, just a few milliseconds should do it, you will have to experiment.
(smallest possible seems to be 400ms, I wish it were a smaller figure)
Let us know how you get on....

Hmmm, I just tried this playing some Wagner, it should work but, at least on my computer it still makes audio clicks etc......
I believe this may be due to the low spec, cpu. My cpu usage bubbles around 15 to 20% during normal playback , but peaks at 100% during track changeover.
Ubuntu Gutsy, AMD Athlon XP2000+, 1012 MB ram.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm really seeing some fairly long pauses sometimes --- does Amarok read-ahead and buffer the start of the next track before the previous has finished?

Ian

only if you enable crossfade, I think. otherwise there can be pauses at trackchange if you have system issues. for example music on a remote or slow drive; using compiz or other effects desktops; having a slower computer. Note: a slower computer would be something under 1 GHz, with less than 512MB RAM. If you're using a mysql database on a remote server this could cause additional delay at trackchange.

I have been investigating the application called "Aqualung" as it says it is a "gapless" audio player.
Go to Ubuntu "Applications-Add/Remove-Aqualung", and install it.
Interestingly on my computer listed above it works very well. Playing FLAC files I can move/drag seamlessly to any point in the track (my Amarok cannot do this with FLAC), I get seamless playback of adjoining tracks. CPU usage is around 7% moving up to 15% at seamless track change. So, in conclusion, these things are possible... I look forward to the time that they are possible in Amarok.