I know there are multiple requests for gapless audio playback, but mine is slightly different. It’s about what happens between tracks from the perspective of the system’s audio source being passed to the receiver.
I have Plex configured to use pass-through for everything and when it comes to watching movies it’s fine, I don’t mind that when I start a movie and the receiver switches from Windows’ audio engine to Dolby Atmos or DTS HD there’s a short (maybe half a second to a second) gap. However, when I’m listening to multiple audio tracks, Plex is not maintaining the same pass-through mechanic between them. Whenever a song starts “with a bang”, I don’t hear it because the receiver always switches back to Windows sound when one track ends and then to Stereo pass-through when the next track starts.
I wish that Plex would somehow maintain the “session” (for the lack of a better word) if it knows that there’s another track scheduled for playback to avoid this switch. This could of course then lead to the introduction of gapless playback, but even without it, I would appreciate the lack of this pause without having to disable pass-through every time I want to listen to music just to have a continuous audio stream.
Is something like this even possible or is this just the nature of A/V receivers and it’s unavoidable if I want pass-through?
Could a dev please acknowledge this as an issue or say if it’s actually possible to do or if you’re planning to do it?
It’s very distracting when listening to music. Every new song starts with a half a second cut off because the receiver needs a moment to switch to the direct audio Plex is serving it. This could be avoided if Plex simply wouldn’t switch back to Windows’ audio between every track. If there is another track to play, the session should be maintained.
Right now it already works like this when you pause a track. While paused, you can’t hear any audio from YouTube, for example, because Plex keeps the passthrough active. it only ends it if you use “X” to end the playback. The solution would be to just keep it active the same way between tracks.
Thanks for testing. In my setup everything is also allowed to use passthrough and exclusive mode both in Plex and in the general sound settings (for example, the sound device has the option to allow other apps to take exclusive control enabled). The one difference is that I’m using FLAC files and they are not being converted to PCM. Plex is pushing a raw Stereo signal to the AVR so you could try it again with FLAC to get a stereo stream.
The switching on the AVR may indeed not be noticeable. In fact, it happens so fast, there’s no visual cue on the AVR itself so the question is - did you test it with tracks where the second track immediately starts with music? Some songs start with silence and in those cases it may seem like there’s no gap.
Reg. samples - one good example would be the “Californication” album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, in particular - the switch from song 6 (“Californication”) to song 7 (“Easily”) because song 7 starts immediately on a beat so the kickdrum and cymbal hit are cut off during the switch.
I’m attaching a short recording I made with my phone showing how it sounds when “Californication” ends and “Easily” begins - you can hear how it starts “weird” because of the cut-off. I then manually move to the beginning of the song again to show you how it should have started and prove that this information is there so it’s not some badly made track. Here’s the recording: Dropbox - File Deleted - Simplify your life
Also, to be clear, I can reliably reproduce this with every single track I own, it’s just more noticeable if the track starts on a beat and not with half a second of silence or some super quiet fade-in.
Small correction to what I wrote above - technically my FLACs also seem to be pushed to the AVR as a PCM stream, but it’s still a different stream because it’s stereo.
That said, when you test this, please make sure to set up surround sound in Windows so that by default Windows is streaming multi-channel audio and then when you try to play music via Plex, it would have to switch to a stereo stream.
