I’ve recently starting trying to play music through the Plex player. I listen to a lot of classical music, and a lot of classical recordings divide continuous music into tracks; that is, there is no break in the music, it plays continuously from one track to the next. This works fine on CD players, but the Plex player breaks between tracks, so the music stops for a good part of a second. Any chance this might be fixed at some point? It pretty much makes the player useless for a lot of classical music.
I “think” what you are asking for is “Gapless audio.” I believe it is something that Plex has supposedly been working on for years but they have been unable to or unwilling to solve the problem.
There may now be a way to accomplish what you want but I do know what it is.
Plex has never, as far as I am concerned, been good at playing and handling audio files even though it appears that audio was its first focus.
My suggestion really is to find another way to play your music as Plex is, at least for me, VERY unsuited for audio.
the thing that makes gapless audio possible on a CD is bit counting, each write point has an exact number of bits that can be written to it, and if you miss even a single bit, it creates a gap, continuous play CD’s make sure to write all the way up to the bitpoint to then insert the track marker… Once you break it into .mp3 files (notice plural here), it’s nearly impossible to get it to be gapless via a CD again. Most people will create a single .mp3 with a .cue file that will follow the same procedures when writing another CD (it will fill the last possible write point all the way up and place a track marker, this is what the .cue file handles). The nature of it being divided into individual tracks, is also what causes plex to have a pause between tracks, it doesn’t marry 2 .mp3 files together, as this would cause transcoding to accomplish, and plex prefers to direct play when possible. You would need to have the CD broken into a .mp3/.flac/.wav with an accompanying .cue file in order to facilitate tracks AND gapless playback. However, I am unsure if plex currently supports .cue extensions when looking at the files available… I don’t believe it does, but I could be wrong…
This is what you would have to ask for though in order to get what it is you want… for .cue integration into plex. And then you would need to re-create your .mp3’s from your CD with the accompanying .cue files…
Cue files are not the answer. They are hard to handle and only a few “geek’s” players do support them.
In the Plex world you can get gapless playback currently only if you use either the Android or iOS mobile apps.
Or Plexamp.com on desktop computers.
Plexamp has the added benefit of automatically switching between true gapless and “overlapping” tracks, depending on whether it plays an album or a playlist.
that’s interesting, my android does not play a couple of my electronic rips (broken into tracks) as gapless… Is plexamp a different player altogether?
The plexamp user experience leaves something to be desired (just downloaded and installed)
Yes.
The mobile Android app should use gapless by default. If you want ‘overlap’, you need to enable it explicitly in the player modifier menu
Plexamp is most useful with large libraries, which have their Related Artists, Popular Tracks, and Genre metadata completely populated.
(There is a “headless” version available for Raspberry Pi2/3 [I recommend an additional hi-quality sound interface], which you can control from other Plex clients. It makes gapless and overlap and loudness leveling available as well.)
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So, it definitely seems to TRY to perform gapless when I try and listen closely, but the beginning of the next track stutters for a moment causing gaps… This is with FLAC audio, which my entire library is in at the moment…
The album is Daft Punk Alive 2007…
Which player are you using now?
using Android app on my phone
Nevermind, I figured it out, “sweet fades” was enabled for some reason… without that it does indeed play gapless, I wonder how it got turned on (I didn’t even know that group of settings was there, music in plex is a fairly new thing for me), and I wonder why it stutters so badly with sweet fades… v0v either way, it’s fixed… thanks for your help!
Are these files with higher sample rates or are you using external loudspeakers/sound interface?
24bit/96khz for the vast majority, and for this testing I was just using my phone, I normally listen in my car via bluetooth though
You could be hitting a known bug in the audio engine then. It is already fixed upstream, if I remember correctly, and should find its way into a app release pretty soon.
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Well, at least you’ve all convinced me that Plex player on my tv is not a solution for playing music. Too bad, but I guess that’s life.
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