Comment 3 for bug 45518

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Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe) wrote : Gapless playback between tracks

If the sound stream isn't continuous you will risk you hearing the join because you can have a soundcard buffer underrun. The only way to achieve true gapless playback is by preloading parts of the next track while you are finishing off the previous track (so as far as the soundcard is concerned there is only one long stream of music rather the end of a stream followed by the start of a new stream).

Even extremely small and fast programs suffer this. If you download the soon to be attached 3sine.wav and try doing
aplay 3sine.wav 3sine.wav
you will probably hear a slight blip as the first stops and the second starts. If you were to join the two together in audacity there would be no blip. Likewise if you play them in something that does buffering of the next clip directly after the first stops there would be no gap (XMMS with the esd output plugin is an example of this).

Now as it happens we can't do this test in totem because it is currently throwing gstreamer errors on the wavs but I'm going to guess that if we could test it the gap would be more audible than with aplay.

However even if it were as good as aplay (which I'm guessing is as good as you can get) then would still hear the gap and thus I think this is really a feature request for gapless playback.