So I did some reading up on this, as it's clear there's a great deal of confusion. This is what I found:
As I thought - the gapless info is NOT in an ID3 tag. It's stored in the "XING VBR Header" which is a special header built into the start of the data field (i.e. - it's embedded right in the data stream). I would be _amazed_ if slimserver was somehow stripping this out, it's a lot of work and any competent decoder (like the one in the squeezebox firmware) will happily deal with it as is. So I really don't believe that any significant change to the server/client protocol will be required, and it's possible that no server change at all is required. Description of the MP3 file format, including the location of the XING header is here : http://www.codeproject.com/audio/mpegaudioinfo.asp Description of the contents of that header, including the LAME extensions, are here : http://gabriel.mp3-tech.org/mp3infotag.html The whole problem arises from the fact that mp3 uses fixed length frames, and variable length audio files will therefore rarely be an exact number of frames long. This header fixes this by including both the pregap (i.e. any 0 bytes which may be wrongly present at the start of the first frame) and postgap (any 0 bytes at the end of the last frame). Skipping both will lead to gapless nirvana. Other formats (FLAC, Vorbis, etc) avoid this problem by using variable length frames so no padding is required. There are a number of apps out there which read these headers properly - I know of Winamp, Foobar and iTunes in the Windows world (the NYT link in an earlier post is out of date) and several portable players including the Rio Karma and iPod (although it's not yet known if it actually reads the headers itself or has iTunes do it first). -- radish ------------------------------------------------------------------------ radish's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=77 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=27384 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
