Is there an easy way to identify gapless albums in my local collection? Looking back, I wish I had created a tag for them as I’ve added gapless albums to my collection.
I’m hoping there is a way to do this other than manually going through over 900 albums and trying to remember which are gapless.
Thanks.
No, because it’s not an inherently “fixed and marked” thing. A “gapless” album is simply an album where tracks segue into each other, be that like certain classic albums and operas, live albums, or by design. But there’s no “official” gapless tag.
Indeed, “gapless” is not even an album characteristic per se, but simply a matter of how two or more tracks segue into each other.
I wondered about that. Thanks.
Hmmm…Google says I can use Foobar2000 to identify which albums are gapless;
Ctrl + A), right-click, and choose ReplayGain > Scan selection as albums.0.00sof silence at the track transitions.Anyone try this before? Does it work well?
I don’t have Foobar2000, but I guess I could give it a try. It seems like it would be faster than me manually looking through all my local albums.
I use Foobar2000, though not for that, not sure if that will work the way you want. I wouldn’t know how to sort tracks by silence at track transitions, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be done. Foobar2000 has lots of plugins that can do all kinds of things, so it may be worth a shot.
Foobar2000 is a powerful tool for music files and it can handle all kinds of formats, so it’s a great app to have for anyone who manages a larger offline library.
I am curious about two things:
The terminology “gapless” is used in confusing ways. An audio player can be described as supporting (or not supporting) gapless playback, i.e. whether it has the ability to play continuously from one track to the next without a pause during track transitions. The term “gapless album” doesn’t really make sense technically (gapless is a property of the audio player, not the album), but people mean that to play the album properly, it needs to played using an audio player that supports gapless playback.
May I ask why you want to identify your gapless albums and what you want to do with the information? The Foobar2000 solution seems plausible, but it will not be foolproof and may produce some false positives and false negatives.
I can tell you one thing, that gapless playback is needed for many classical music albums. Record labels frequently split long movements into multiple tracks. For example, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is performed as a single, continuous piece of music 20-25 minutes long. However, on many albums it is not a single track, but split into 25 tracks (theme + 24 variations), many tracks less than 30 seconds long. Listening to it on a player that doesn’t support gapless playback is intolerable.
Yes, this is of course so. In fact, nowadays all audio players that play back lossless files (ALAC/FLAC/AIFF/WAV) are audio players that play “gapless”. I play plenty of recordings (like your example of Rhapsody of a Theme of Paganini) where one long piece is simply divided into single cues, but it’s supposed to be played as one long piece/cue. I don’t even know a current app or HiFi system that wouldn’t play such music “gapless”.
The issue with gapless playback was more important in the days of MP3, which is lossy and was not not originally “gapless”, the files contained padding and no information about exact ending.
I have no idea how many albums I personally have with tracks where there are no gaps in between, but I would guess: a lot.
Anyone using squeeze2upnp can experience how intolerable listening to Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is … that’s actually quite a few users I believe.
What initially brought this up is an issue I had with Roonserver 2.70 where gaps between tracks were sometimes longer than usual. For regular albums with completely separate tracks, this wasn’t a big issue, but I had it happen a couple times when playing tracks that were gapless between tracks which was very disruptive.
This got me thinking it would be convenient, but not entirely necessary I suppose to have my “gapless albums” tagged as such in Roon for easy reference in the future.
That’s a good question I haven’t thought through. My initial thought would be albums where all the tracks play continuously with no breaks. But then, I do have some albums where only some tracks run into each other. I’ll have to give this some thought.
I didn’t know what else to call an album where all tracks run into each other with no breaks. 
I’m hoping my meaning is apparent though.
See above.
I may give it a try just to see how well it works (or not).
I don’t think I have a lot of albums where the entire album plays without a break. But then again, I do have a decent classical collection as well as opera which is more likely to be gapless throughout.
OK, now this is obviously an issue, I can see that.
As I noted up there, modern players/servers play albums just the way they should be played. I have thousands of albums, all lossless/high-res in ALAC format, and not matter how I play them – with Roon, without Roon directly, on my HiFi system, on my phone, from my NAS or downloaded – all files are exactly played as they should, meaning there are no gaps where there aren’t supposed to be any.
If you experience gaps between tracks longer than usual, I would check whether it’s a setting issue? What format are these? Note: lossless formats are usually always “gapless” by default (as they are the original PCM anyway). There were some issues with lossy formats though. MP3 is not inherently gapless, and AAC is not inherently gapless. Both can be configured for gapless playback, if the encoder and the player handle gapless metadata correctly. I never much bothered with lossy music files though except for the USB stick of my car.
Because when I play back music where one or more tracks are segueing into each other (not just classical, opera and live albums, but also albums like Madonna’s CONFESSIONS FROM A DANCE FLOOR, Vangelis’s BLADE RUNNER, JEFF WAYNE’S WAR OF THE WORLDS) via Roon Server (or any other apps I use really), there are no gaps in between the relevant tracks.
This started when I updated to 2.70, though soon after I also updated the OS (Arch Linux), so I can’t be sure which may be at fault. I updated the OS again yesterday and Roon is behaving so far. We’ll see if it holds.
What settings would I look for? I haven’t changed any settings.
These are FLAC files. 
I tried doing this with Foobar2000, but I couldn’t get it to work; it got way too complicated too fast to supposedly set up Foobar2000 to show Track Silence duration. I could’t get it to show a column for this and the instructions for adding the necessary add ons were confusing and unclear (which add ons needed??? Where to get??? How to install??? UGH!!). BTW, I am not a “computer person”.
So, I’m giving up on this. It simply isn’t important enough to me to waste any more time pursuing a solution. It would be less aggravating for me to just take my time and manually go through my collection and identify the albums in question (not sure I’ll even do this).
Thanks for all the feedback!
The root of the problem seems to me to find why Roon is adding gaps where they don’t belong in the first place. As I said, I don’t have the issue. FLAC/ALAC files should just play exactly as the original CD (if from a rip), and not insert any gaps.
Do these files play without gaps when you play them in other players?
Do you have evidence for this assertion?
@Saturn94 just had some kind of performance problem.
Obviously if there is a delay when loading the next track, there will be a gap. But for now it seems solved:
Hey, talk about taking a quote and stripping it of its context.
The evidence is simply that the OP said that it does, it’s not my assertion. He stated that Roonserver 2.70 inserts gaps between tracks that are sometimes longer than usual.
In fact, I explicitly stated that I do not have that issue myself, so I did not say “Roon is adding gaps where they don’t belong in the first place” but “The root of the problem seems to me to find why Roon is adding gaps where they don’t belong in the first place” in response to the OP, which is not quite the same thing.
If the OP experiences gaps where there should be none, my suggestion is to find out why. Which is why I also suggested to check the files and compare how they play in other players, to zoom in on the issue and find out if it’s got to do anything with the Roon Server at all.
I haven’t tried a different player. I only use Roon.
It’s only happened occasionally and I’m unable to reliably reproduce it (IOW, I can’t make it happen). The couple occasions where a gap was inserted between two gapless tracks, when I played them again, they were fine.
As @Suedkiez pointed out, this issue hasn’t reappeared since updating the OS again. It’s only been a couple days though, so I’ll wait and see if the issue returns. Another user mentioned to me he is experiencing this, though to a much more severe degree. He mentioned it is fine after a reboot, but then performance greatly deteriorates after a few days.
The slow loading screens (discography, etc) have returned. 
I’m now testing to see if the inappropriate gaps have returned as well.
I added several albums and a bunch of tracks (about 340 tracks total) to the queue to test for unusual gaps. I let it play for about 4 hours straight. All local content except the first album (13 tracks) was from Qobuz.
Within an album, I didn’t experience any inappropriate gaps; albums with no gaps between tracks played straight through no problem, and albums with normal gaps between tracks sounded normal.
However, when changing from one album to another, there was often a gap of 5-10+ seconds between albums.
A gap of a few seconds between albums is not unusual - were they all of the same resolution format?