Subject says it all. If the answers are anything other than “yes” or “in the next few months”, you don’t really think it’s appropriate to ask anyone to make WD a Reader’s Choice preference given that several other streamers offer gapless playback, do you?
nop
non of WD media players or streamers have gapless playback
Here we go again with requests for gapless playback – jeeze, really, what percent of ALL recorded music is gapless? Answer: not much. I have 1000s of CDs, LPs, and eMusic downloads, some of which is on the WD drive. I have over 10,000 tracks of music on the WD drive, and of this, two are pop albums that are gapless. If I just HAVE to hear them as gapless music, I play them from the iPod to the stereo, instead of from the WD, or, play the CD. But, I don’t obsess or lose sleep over the issue – or even care about it at all.
I notice that each time this request is made, it is “someone’s” first post. I think it is the same person; spoofing another new identity. Tell me I am incorrect! If the poster IS the same person, why not leave this issue (and us) alone – and get a life.
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Or a player that supports gapless?
Dear Mike, I guess we are not listening to the same music. I have tons of ambient music that actually should be played gapless. Or at least RHCP Blood Sugar Sex Magic album.
Yeah, there’s plenty of music that’s better played gapless (Pink Floyd’s The Wall comes to mind, as do numerous classical and jazz albums I have.)
Very few hardware players do gapless because, as I understand it, the hardware can’t support it. Gapless playback requires dual audio decoding engines to be done properly.
It can be done with a single decoder, in theory, but it would require the software to verify that all tracks’ encoding parameters are identical.
Your best bet if you require gapless is to skip the hardware players and go to a software-based player like the Pi/XBMC (and I don’t know for sure if even it does gapless or not…)
…and there’s little doubt that the Play’s hardware is beneath the Live’s hardware, so no surprise that it doesn’t do gapless.
foetus wrote:
Dear Mike, I guess we are not listening to the same music. I have tons of ambient music that actually should be played gapless. Or at least RHCP Blood Sugar Sex Magic album.
Before I go any further, I agree that gapless playback has advantages for some music. I am not anti-gapless, but the messages that appear on the forum about it from time to time appear to come from the same person – just under different names. (it is always the very first post from that someone) and the messages are so similar sounding. I think the votes are being padded in this way.
Anyway, it is cool that on a Donna Summer album, Hot Stuff merges so smoothly into Bad Girls without missing a beat! (It has a good beat, and you can dance to it!) A reason why lack-of-gap doesn’t bother me too much is because of how I listen to music today; ever since I have had an iPod, and WD player. I like to shuffle my zillions of jazz, blues, rock and whatever tracks, and in so doing, I have made my own “radio station” and am not locked into listening to a whole LP, or CD album anymore. I really have accumulated more music than I can ever listen to more than once or twice anymore, and by shuffling the decks, I can at least sample most of them.
And, if I want ambient music – I just tune in Hearts of Space! Bellieve it or not, that program is in its 28th year.
I don’t shuffle my classical music. BTW, most of this music is sequential, but not gapless (same can be said for jazz, blues, most rock, etc). When I want classical I play an album in track order. Otherwise, I like to play from my very scrambled playlists anymore; most especially when music is playing all day and I just want music around for casual company.
Excuse me for digressing and talking so much about music, but it was a refreshing break from helping one more lost soul “locate his network shares”. 
I actually wrote two requests for gapless playback, first one for first WD HD TV player and second for Hub. I know it´s dream, but what will we do if lose our dreams 
foetus wrote:
I actually wrote two requests for gapless playback, first one for first WD HD TV player and second for Hub. I know it´s dream, but what will we do if lose our dreams
I think it won’t happen until after Amazon Prime is available for the WDs – and you know how fast THAT most popular request is moving along ! 
"Very few hardware players do gapless because, as I understand it, the hardware can’t support it. Gapless playback requires dual audio decoding engines to be done properly. "
No, neither statement is even remotely true.
“It can be done with a single decoder, in theory, but it would require the software to verify that all tracks’ encoding parameters are identical.”
Wrong again.
"
…and there’s little doubt that the Play’s hardware is beneath the Live’s hardware, so no surprise that it doesn’t do gapless."
I can’t even begin to try to make out what you mean by this gibberish.
Please stop making things up. You’d probably have a far lower post count if you did. Gapless has been part of CD playback since the CD’s inception, with hardware and software far less capable than what is available today, so any suggestions that the lack of gapless is a limitation of anything other than competence or priority is ludicrous.
Per Mike27oct:
“…but the messages that appear on the forum about it from time to time appear to come from the same person – just under different names. (it is always the very first post from that someone) and the messages are so similar sounding. I think the votes are being padded in this way.”
Or perhaps many people feel the same way regarding the same issue. If you have evidence to back up your conspiracy claim, then produce it. Otherwise, Occam’s Razor suggests the far simpler possibility is more likely. If there is any conspiracy, it seems it’s more on your side with fellow apologists trying to frame gapless as a fringe or unreasonable demand.
If the rumours are true, next mp will be android based.
daffyd48 - gapless play on a CD is not hard as the tracks follow each other on a physical medium, in fact the gap is artificially produced by a what could be considered a slight pause.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_playback
By the way the gibberish you refer to is in regard to the WD play and the hardware it uses which is likely to be less powerful than the standard WD live. As the WD live does not do gapless, Tony was making the point that its no surprise that Play does not. Do you understand now?
You say that all the things Tony says are untrue but fail to say how this would be implemented on the player. Perhaps instead of insulting users you could give us a technical explanation which does not involve the CD which has no real relationship to this media player.
Gapless is not hard, period.
As you’ve read in other posts on the topic here, uPnP has had the necessary commands for over a decade, a single person at JRiver accommodated it via DLNA/uPnP in a few hours when asked (also mentioned in another post here), Linn has their own approach, Apple has their approach, and on and on and on. No need to invent another approach - WD could just choose to implement gapless using one of the above approaches. I don’t care how it gets done, I just want it done.
Since WD hasn’t come clean on why they won’t do it, we can speculate endlessly (as you have done), but I prefer to not speculate and just hope they decide to do it. Soon. Like now.
“Since WD hasn’t come clean on why they won’t do it” ???
“Soon. Like now.” ???
This will not get you anywhere.
You are not first person that would like WD Media Player to have this feature
http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Hub-Ideas/Music-Gapless-playback/idi-p/125806
and there are other posts like this.
And if you see solution in other companies devices, we are not stopping you.
Like I said, there is good chance that new device will be android based,
and therefore you will be able to chose apps for your music reproduction.
It does not mean that all older device will change system to android.
Thing is, you don´t know if someone is actualy working on this problem right now,
but I can assure you that in last 5 years, WD Media Players are only media players that
you can relay on, and if you see new WD Media player box with Gapless writen all over it…
daffyd48 wrote:
Gapless is not hard, period.
Eloquently put which got us totally conviced.
daffyd48 wrote:
Please stop making things up. You’d probably have a far lower post count if you did. Gapless has been part of CD playback since the CD’s inception, with hardware and software far less capable than what is available today, so any suggestions that the lack of gapless is a limitation of anything other than competence or priority is ludicrous.
You realize that, instead of DISproving my point, by using CDs as an example, you actually are supporting it, right?
daffyd48 wrote:
The GPL software for all WD devices is available for free on the web. Amaze us with proof of your statement and write us all a firmware package that does gapless playback. You’ll be revered and placed into the annals of history forever.
With reference to the first post, it seems that users did seem to think that the WD live was OK even without gapless playback as it won the award with 46% of the vote.
I’ll bet the most important thing to WD is their profit, which is heavily related to market share. What’s their market share in the streamer market compared to Roku and Apple? Roku and Apple have about 45% each, and WD about 5%. Wow.
I heartily encourage companies to be focused on profits and profitability. In this case, with such a pathetic market share, providing gapless would seem to have far greater upside then downside with respect to market share, even if the gapless haters/apologists like the posters above would go so far as dump WD if gapless were added.
I agree ARM/android solutions seem the most promising in the future, in no small part to get away from the crappy dev kit proprietary code from the likes of Sigma Designs. I just hope WD becomes a viable media streaming box competitor soon - greater the competition, the better for consumers.
Daffy, you are cordially invited to go buy yourself a media player that play gapless, toss out your WD, and spend your time griping about something other than gapless playback and insulting members here who are here to help – not hinder.
By the way, I already have a gapless media player that works fine and is plugged into my home entertainment center like a WD, Roku, Apple TV etc. So, I don’t need another one. Oh, what is this new player, I’ll tell you since you might want to get one? It’s called an iPod.
