[How To] How to Hack TREBLE Into Giving You Sweet Fades™ For Any Track (Plex Pass Req'd)

Plex Labs
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TL;DR You will need to place your tracks into a playlist, but you can't stop there. You have to throw at least one track from a different album or artist into the playlist.

Sweet Fades™ only works with Playlists, Radio Stations, and shuffle mode. If you play an album like the purist you are, then true gapless playback is suppose to kick in. However, this is not always the case.

It’s been made clear that there are distinctions between true gapless playback and sweet fades. Gapless playback happens when you play an album straight through. When you shuffle an album, then sweet fades takes over (shout-outs to Elan for the clarification). Soft transitions occurs when you skip tracks and when you pause/resume a track.

There is a way to trigger Sweet Fades on your own and that is by placing the tracks you want sweet fades applied to into a playlist. If you do a single album, it won’t work. TREBLE, the underlying audio engine, won’t trigger sweet fades for you if you do this. You will have to add a least one track from a different album or artist for the trick to work.

You will know it has worked when you see the ability to toggle sweet fades on/off in your Plex app on your mobile device. You can use this quick check to see if the trick is working for you should you wish to use Plexamp instead.

True gapless playback and sweet fades currently do not work on the desktop Plex program or web browser client. The same goes for Android TV and Chromecast.
Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to Apple TV, “smart” TVs, Roku, or Amazon Fire sticks. If you have success with true gapless playback and/or sweet fades on another platform, then please by all means share with the rest of the class.

Weird Quirks

  • I’ve noticed that certain albums when played straight through will have sweet fades enabled. Often times, they won’t.
  • Sweet fades will typically be enabled for compilation CD’s although, this is not always the case.
  • Native gapless playback albums transcoded in either FLAC or ALAC seem to play better with true gapless playback
  • Based upon my observations, TREBLE looks for differences in a play queue.

If artist + album are the same throughout the queue = disable Sweet Fades; trigger gapless playback
If artist or albums are different in the queue, then enable Sweet Fades; disable gapless playback
If shuffle = enable Sweet Fades
If artists + albums are different, but all are gapless playback by nature, then disable Sweet Fades; enable gapless playback

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I’d phrase this another way—gapless kicks in when you’re playing sequential tracks (e.g. track 1, track 2, track 2). It also works across different albums e.g. if you’ve queued multiple albums or are using Random Album Radio.

All other cases will Sweet Fade if you have the option enabled.

I’d need to ask the client teams, but AFAIK the toggle is a necessary for not a sufficient condition for Sweet Fades; you need the toggle enabled + a run of non-sequential tracks.

The only case we’ve seen of this is an album with missing tracks (so per above, non-sequential).

This should not be the case if they are played sequentially.

That’s exactly right; per above, it seems if the PQ is a run of sequential tracks (optionally across multiple albums). If so, then gapless is enabled. Otherwise, if the setting is enabled, it’ll Sweet Fade.

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