Gapless playback in Zune?? - Windows Phone 7 General

Hi all
Had an HD7 for the last week, great phone. I've found a couple of little bugs (eg if your browsing in IE and go back to the home tab, use some other apps then go back to IE, theres no way of going back in the browser as the back button just takes you back to the home page or previous app?)
Anyway, onto my question, does the Zune player on the phone support gapless playback of tracks? I've got a lot of albums of live concerts etc that would normally playback seemlessly on my old iPhone but have gaps when played on the Zune. Couldnt find any options anywhere to change it. Does anyone know if this is supported or not?
Thanks!

I know gapless is supported on the ZuneHD. But I know even then some people had issues in getting it to work, and it is all based on how your albums are tagged in the ID3. Once I get my HD7 I can confirm if albums that played fine gapless on the ZuneHD do so on the HD7 and i'll inspect the ID3 to figure out what the appropriate tags are.

Thanks! All my music is imported into Zune from iTunes so maybe iTunes hasn't tagged the music properly? Or Zune can't read the itunes tags?

Gapless works on Zune HD as long as there is no DRM...thus, if you bring your own tracks with no DRM, gapless works perfectly...however, if you have a zune pass, funny enough, gapless does not work...
This is a known issue for many months but MS has no fixed it so far...(people seemed more upset at the lack of apps for the Zune HD than fixing core music related issues)...

Thanks. I seem to get this from my own ripped CD's as well as music bought from iTunes and music from my Zune subscription.
I might try re-ripping one of my CD's in Zune and see if it works.
Gapless playback seems to be a massive missing feature of an audio device?!

A big one for me is this. I've got 200 or so live/dj mix albums, so not having this feature has pretty much made my new HD7 worthless to me.
All my music is in .M4A format and was ripped/converted in iTunes. I also tried ripping a mix CD to .MP3 format, but got the same result.
I just don't understand why MS haven't implemented it. If there are no plans to add this, then my HD7 will have to be returned.

I know this is an old thread, but I've noticed something when using bluetooth and my music...
I use my HD2 (WinMo7) when I'm down the gym and a lot of my mix tracks often jump at the mix point, some even have some stuttering...
However I've noticed that when I'm streaming via bluetooth to my car stereo, the same tracks don't jump or stutter and play virtually continous. There is only the odd tiny space on some tracks...

Beatles USB gapless
My Beatles, Abbey Road Remastered 2nd side sounds great on Zune on WP7. Very slight breaks between songs, but nothing objectionable to me.
Make sure that when you select the music, you select the Play All or Play Album selection. Don't try to play the 1st track and expect things to go uninterrupted.
Definitely the Abbey Road playback is different than the first side, which has song-to-song gaps.
Enjoy Windows Phone 7!
-e

I've been digging around recently in trying to get some gapless in WP7.
I then finally notice that the Zune PC software doesn't even do gapless! The gap is shorter, I suspect due to the more powerful hardware, but it's still not gapless.
Windows Media Player seems to emit a slight click
Winamp and Foobar both seamlessly transition to the next song.
But, back to WP7. It's now apparent that either MS needs to fix this (they didn't in Mango, so they probably won't for a while, if at all), or a third party app that doesn't use Zune could be created, (or ported).

Related

Audio stuttering at the end of each track

Hey all,
got my Omnia 7 the other day and so far its definitely made me drop my iPhone 4, even with all its apps.
that being said the audio is making me second guess that decision. Each track played, the last 10 seconds or so stutter. This is tracks on the actual device and not coming streaming zune marketplace.
This is every track and its more than annoying.
not sure if this is omnia specific or windows phone 7 OS issue.
anyways, besides that little hurdle im very happy with it so far, the omnia comes highly recommended from me besides a couple of bizzare hardware decisions. ( sync/charge port on the top of the device being a notable stupid decision.
hopefully someone can help but feel free to ask any other windows 7 phone / omnia based q's.
did you use zune to pull the iTunes music? maybe try ripping from a cd and then loading it to zune? maybe also try changing the quality of the audio up a bit and get it to reconvert? worst comes to worst... try a hard reset?
The Gate Keeper said:
did you use zune to pull the iTunes music? maybe try ripping from a cd and then loading it to zune? maybe also try changing the quality of the audio up a bit and get it to reconvert? worst comes to worst... try a hard reset?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
the music is a mix of ripped cd's and music bought using a zune pass direct from Zune, I can't see it being the source material. More the player at fault.
I will try a hard reset when im at home and can back everything up.
Thanks for your answers.
hi
i have a htc 7 mozart and have a little problem with sounds as well. more often than not when i get a text come through its like the sound stutters for about 1/2 second then carries on and may play a couple of notes. i contacted htc and they said and i quote "try changing the tone. if the phone still sounds like its juddering/skipping. there maybe an issue. but it could just be the way the tone works. "
Now this has done nothing at all but i cant see there is a hardware fault as its only when a sms comes in that is the problem.
the only issue i have is a small pause at the end of each track, after the brilliance of the zune hd (whoever stole it should burn) i expected more esp as they said it was full zune experiences yet there is also no artist bio (i used to love reading them)
lumpaywk said:
the only issue i have is a small pause at the end of each track, after the brilliance of the zune hd (whoever stole it should burn) i expected more esp as they said it was full zune experiences yet there is also no artist bio (i used to love reading them)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
the gapless playing is an issue but not a massive one for me.
losing bio and in particular "similar artists" is really annoying, was a great way to find artists you hadnt previously heard of.
this stuttering is starting to annoy me, pulling the battery and restarting seemed to have resolved the issue but then every now and again it will happen.
I'm looking at an artist bio on my phone right now. When you select an artist, the "tabs" should be albums -> songs -> bio. Perhaps its just there because I am using a Zune Pass trial?

[Q] Is it Defy or all android that suck at playing media?

I've been trying for days to get the defy to work i want.
I listen to audiobooks, music and podcasts, and I need to be able to control it from the headset
I tried default player, google listen, winamp, doggcatcher. And cant get the thing to work right!!
Music+ doesn't even register the button press, listen resumes and skips to next track, even if you're playing another audio in the background. Winamp on its own is fine but does not download podcasts, and doggcatcher has conflicts with winamp on the headset thing.
Has anyone find a good solution for this? it seems just the way android is built, and the lack of a good unified media player (with or integrated with podcast manager).
Such a disappointment... I was so looking for having an android phone! If I can't find a solution, it seems its not for someone like me untill they integrate things a little more tightly.
Well, it's not the Defy. And while I don't think that Android sucks at playing media I do agree with some of your points. I also listen to audio books and podcast. For the moment I'm using AudioBook Player 2 for audiobooks. It's not prefect by a long shot but it does the job. As for podcast I haven't found anything useful yet. The defaut player is suppose to play podcast but there is no way to skip through. If I have to stop listening to the podcast there is no way of getting back to were I left off. And while the device obviously play videos, and does so quite well, I haven't found any type of video player interface. The only way I can start a video is by going into the gallery and taping on the file I want to play. That dosen't seem right to me.
So yeah, I feel your frustration.
JamesDax said:
Well, it's not the Defy. And while I don't think that Android sucks at playing media I do agree with some of your points.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, sorry. I did not meant to bash, its just that I soo wanted to love it... and I don't, and if there is no good solution I think android is not for my for now. I don't know. It has so many great things!
Thanks for your suggestions I'll look into it.
On another subject : When I listen to music, I can't do anything else (switching to landscape mode e.g.), otherwise it's really slow.
Is anybody else having that bug ? Some guy here mentioned it. But he then said he fixed it without having it deodexed. How do you fix this ?
Meridian is a media player that does most of what you want, with the possible exceptin of podcasting (don´t use it, don´t know).
It remembers where you last listened to a track, and if you switch to video (which has a library of it´s own) it still remembers where in the audio track you were when you go back to that. So actually better than WMP there... ;-)
Only thing that grinds my gears with this is an annoying bug that starts a random track when I press the button on any wired headset. If I hang up a call, or if I want to pause and then start playing in Spotify or radio, Meridian starts playing a tune in the background. I thought it was a bug I was having with my Pulse, but it´s there with the Defy as well.
A BT headset has none of these issues though.
Don't worry google is working on a multimedia improvement......soooonnnn soon, also has anyone tried poweramp

Music and the best way to handle it.

Greetings. Im hoping someone might be able to help me with a very annoying problem im having.
I have somewhere around 2000 music tracks, all of which are uploaded to Google Music. Ive had GMusic since they first announced the beta and i love the fact that my entire library is everywhere I go. I also love that i can download the tracks directly on my phone, from my phone.
However using the app to play music is horrible. In the past i used poweramp, which is a wonderful player. My main problem with Google Music is it audibly cuts the power from the headphone jack in between tracks, so when i have it hooked up to my car stereo i hear a pop when the track changes... which annoys me to utter hell. On top of that it behaves weirdly some times, for example i had it set to shuffle all the other day, and it would stop on every song, and i would have to hit play manually to go to the next song.
What i would like to do is go back to using PowerAmp, but be able to manage my music as easily as i do with GMusic. Problem is that, PowerAmp doesnt see the music i download from the GMusic app and the one time it did, all the meta-data wasnt there. So all poweramp said was "Unknown track 1".
The other side of the problem is managing it on my computer. Since i bought music from Itunes and Google Music, keeping everything organized has become a nightmare(i have a number of compilations, and when you download the music from google music, it organizes it by artist not by the album). Which is why i dont want to have to manually move files to my phone. Ive tried WinAmp and Double Twist, and both have their annoyances. I was wondering what other people do, maybe someone can make my life easier.
subsonic, streams from your PC, no need to upload it to the cloud and it the UI is not bad either. it can also cache your streams for offline play

[Q] Zune replacement?

My zune is on its way out with the audio jack starting to give me problems. seeing as i dont have the skills to repair it myself I was hoping to use a family members upgrade who doesn't want a new phone to grab this phone. From a quick play through with it the device feels pretty close to the zune music player. Can anyone tell me more about it as a media player? Also if i were to leave it in airplane mode what could i expect on battery life.
nobo77 said:
My zune is on its way out with the audio jack starting to give me problems. seeing as i dont have the skills to repair it myself I was hoping to use a family members upgrade who doesn't want a new phone to grab this phone. From a quick play through with it the device feels pretty close to the zune music player. Can anyone tell me more about it as a media player? Also if i were to leave it in airplane mode what could i expect on battery life.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have the weak but functional HTC Trophy for work because I wanted to learn Windows Phone 7 but not ready to give up Android. It has the Zune player on it but I can honestly say it is not a replacement. For one, we are limited to 16 Gig storage, so you for sure can sync more music than that. And as far as I know, you cannot make playlists with streaming ZunePass music. Plus, I miss the scrolling text, time, etc information as a song is playing like the ZuneHD does.
garak0410 said:
I have the weak but functional HTC Trophy for work because I wanted to learn Windows Phone 7 but not ready to give up Android. It has the Zune player on it but I can honestly say it is not a replacement. For one, we are limited to 16 Gig storage, so you for sure can sync more music than that. And as far as I know, you cannot make playlists with streaming ZunePass music. Plus, I miss the scrolling text, time, etc information as a song is playing like the ZuneHD does.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not sure how you're using the phone for music, but when I go to play a song it shows me album art, time lapsed and time remaining as well as the time of day at top-right of the screen.
I have plenty of playlists, some auto and some not, that include zune pass music and they all work just fine.
I had the old Zune 120GB model and while it had more space I don't know anyone who actually needs 600 hours of music with them at all times, the 16GB has suited me just fine I have a ton of my favorite tracks as well as video/audio podcasts that I take to work with me at all times, it's great.
xyexz said:
I'm not sure how you're using the phone for music, but when I go to play a song it shows me album art, time lapsed and time remaining as well as the time of day at top-right of the screen.
I have plenty of playlists, some auto and some not, that include zune pass music and they all work just fine.
I had the old Zune 120GB model and while it had more space I don't know anyone who actually needs 600 hours of music with them at all times, the 16GB has suited me just fine I have a ton of my favorite tracks as well as video/audio podcasts that I take to work with me at all times, it's great.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was speaking specifically how it will cycle through picture(s) of a singer/band, with the letters going across the screeen, etc. The Zune player on a Windows Phone will not do that.
How can you make a playlist specifically for ZunePass streaming on the Windows Phone Zune player?
Thanks!
Brian

Chromecast Audio Review from a Squeezebox User

As title says, this is going to be a Chromecast Audio review from the point of view of a Squeezebox user. As such, it will mostly be comparing CCA and Squeezebox. I'm also hoping some other CCA users see this and might be able to chime in on some of the shortcomings I'm having with CCA.
Overall, I'm liking CCA better than Squeezebox. CCA sync is dead on, and I have 6 rooms going. My squeezebox setup was a mix of PC and android devices running various squeezebox player software, and the sync would always be off for the first few seconds of a song. Occasionally, audio would get out of sync and starting and stopping playback was necessary. I listen to a lot of podcasts, some of which I pay for, and Squeezebox doesn't support HTTPS for podcasts. CCA is so easy to use for podcasts, it's increased my already high amount of podcast listening by quite a bit. Another benefit of CCA and podcasts, since I'm using the same app I listen to podcasts with on my phone, playback is synced. I used to listen to part of a podcast in the car on the way home from work, then have to scrub through podcast on squeezebox to find the spot I was at. Not the largest inconvenience in the world, but it's nice that I don't have to do it any more.
Now on to the shortcomings of CCA. Two things that worked with Squeezebox that are important features to me were mixing local files with tracks from Spotify and Last.fm Scrobbling. I have a large music library and quite a bit of it isn't available on most streaming services. Google Music let's you upload your local library and stream it, so I'm trying to match the Spotify/Local file functionality this way. So far, it's working pretty well, but that leads to the scrobbling issues. If I play music from my phone, the app seems to time out and stop live tracking what is playing, thus the scrobbling app I have also starts to miss playing tracks. This happens even when the phone is plugged in to charge. As a work around, I'll play music from my PC using Google Play music on chrome with a chrome extension to scrobble. This works great, except now the only thing I can control with my phone is play/pause and volume. If I want to add tracks to playlist, change songs, etc, gotta walk over to the PC. With squeezebox, I could control the music with any device, and switch between devices doing the controlling with no issue.
There are programs, like Kodi and Emby, that have the ability to cast music. I'm pretty sure they also have plugins for Last.fm. So they would seem to solve scrobbling and controlling with multiple devices. I'm not 100% clear on whether they can play local files as well as tracks from Spotify or Google Music (or any other streaming service for that matter) on the same playlist. I think my next project is going to be setting up Kodi or Emby and seeing if I can get the functionality I want.
Another minor thing about CCA I'm not liking is that you can't control volumes until after playback is started. If I'm playing music in the evening before heading out with friends, I'll turn the volume up. Then in the morning, if I want to play something to get me moving, I have to hit play and then pause as fast as possible so my eardrums aren't blown out. I'm going to have to start teaching myself to turn down the volume when I stop playing music...
I have my personal music library on a NAS and play it all through BubbleUPnP App on a range of android devices. Best option I have found for anybody in the family being able to control all the music collection from any device.
I'm trying to match the Spotify o download music from insta-downloader.online l file functionality this way. So far, it's working pretty well, but that leads to the scrobbling issues. If I play music from my phone and I heard very nice in my app the music
Yeah this is App https://insta-downloader.online/ on a range of android devices, In my opinion is very nice

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