Hello!
First I want to say that I love plexamp both in my mobile devices and in my desktop/laptop computers. I was a little bit skeptic at the beginning coming from good old Winamp 5 and a Samba share, but finally it made the way up to my main computer and music player.
I’ve searched the forum and couldn’t find a thread suggesting this, so here I go: I like the sweet fades (and volume levelling) option, it makes listening to playlists of random tracks or just a random/radio play a lot more satisfying. It works really well 99% of the times and I think it’s been getting better every update. BUT, when I play an album in its intended order by the artist, with its transitions and interludes between songs (you know, some music albums are like a movie or a book just by listening to them) sweet fades ends up sadly butchering the experience.
And to disable it you have to go to settings, playback, disable, go back to the album and click again in play album to create a new playlist which effectively has sweet fades disabled. Not ideal, I’d say.
Lastly, if you believe this should be implemented. Maybe you could extend it to the “Loudness levelling” option. Although it is not that big of a deal, both sweet fades and loudness levelling its intended for random music playing and not an album which is almost all of the times mastered to the same loudness across all tracks.
Anyway, I don’t know if anyone feels like me about this. Surely most of the people nowadays listens to playlists or radios and this is not a problem for them at all, but I think there are people around like me that sometimes likes to relax and play a full album from first to last track!
Cheers, and sincerely keep up the good work with Plexamp!
How are you starting playback?
Because Plexamp already disables sweet fades automatically, if you play a single album.
Fades may get re-enabled if you add additional tracks to the play queue.
Or if you don’t play the album as such, but use a playlist instead.
Oh, maybe that was it. I played a single track by clicking on it and then added an album to the queue to be played next.
I kind of thought that Plexamp already disabled sweet fades while playing an album but last three or four times I may have done it this way and confused me.
you’ve actually stumbled upon an area we’ve found a bit challenging, around whether to Sweet Fade or not in some cases. right now we look at the entire play queue to try to see if it’s albums or not, and look for continuous hunks of tracks (so that, e.g. Random Album Radio) or just queueing multiple albums should play gaplessly.
we have to be careful because e.g. you might have a few consecutive tracks from an album just from random playback, and if we didn’t fade them, and they weren’t from a gapless-style album, it would sound like fades are broken.
so right now we’re conservative towards gapless playback and only kick it in when it absolutely looks like album-after-album (or just an album).
Maybe I’m being naive or simply ignorant of how plexamp works internally, but couldn’t you check whether the next song in the playlist belongs to the same album and is the next track and switch to gapless?
Although I’m guessing the set of sweet fades or gapless is applied when creating the playlist and is not switchable per-track
no, for the reason i mention above. imagine if you were shuffling a playlist and you randomly ended up with two consecutive tracks from the same album; it would be a real party pooper if there were seconds of silence between the two in this context.
Ah, I hadn’t thought of that kind of context. I understand the conservative stance then and how is challenging to tune for everyone.
Maybe a toggle to enable/disable for the current playlist in the now playing menu? A more advanced sweet fades submenu to turn on or off depending on the item/shuffle on or off?
IMO simplest solution is not looking at the whole queue, but only at 2 tracks and see if they sequential from the same album.
something like:
if (current_track.album == next_track.album)
&& (current_track.number == next_track.number-1)
then
smartfades = off
else
smartfades = user_setting.smartfades_mode
end if
this should cover just about any situation where any 2 sequential album tracks play together, whether it be album play, random play, radio play, etc.
Even with Sweet Fades enabled, “gapless tracks” won’t fade. Because if they start with a high volume, Plexamp won’t it lay over the end of the previous track (at least nor for long).
