Splicing mp3 together

[Christophe76fr]

Hello.

While browsing my music library, I remembered that some of my old mp3 files had not been encoded using LAME. The result is that, when playing two consecutive songs on, let's say, a live album, there is a tiny but annoying silence (very small gap) between the two songs. So gapless for MP3 files works only with files that contains the right information somewhere in the file.

Then I remembered the days I used winamp on windows. There was a little plugin, written by someone, named "MP3Splice", that achieved very well the gapless play of MP3 even "badly" encoded. I think the way it worked was that the beginning of the next song was loaded very early and the plugin somehow "reconnected" the two waveforms. The result was near perfect.

I wondered, would it be possible to write such a plugin for audacious, which has now become my everyday player on linux ?

Here is a link to the "mp3slice" plugin. :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mp3splice/
and a link where you can download the original dll:
https://winampheritage.com/plugin/mp3splice/112588

[MikeSS8]

I can't test right now but would plugins->effect->crossfade with the right settings do it? Maybe if "overlap" could be set to zero or a negative number, maybe?

[Christophe76fr]

First, the crossfade plugins can't be set to 0 or a negative number. I tried the "remove silence" plugin. But it has two issues : first, it removes the silence even when the silence is intended, and second, it leaves a "click" during the transition.
I am no programmer at all so I am asking very naively : would it be complicated to understand how the "mp3slice" plugin works and try to program it for audacious ?

[Christophe76fr]

First, the crossfade plugins can't be set to 0 or a negative number. I tried the "remove silence" plugin. But it has two issues : first, it removes the silence even when the silence is intended, and second, it leaves a "click" during the transition.
I am no programmer at all so I am asking very naively : would it be complicated to understand how the "mp3slice" plugin works and try to program it for audacious ?

[WildPenquin]

MP3 never supported gapless really well. The problem stems from the fact that MP3 the end of the audio is not precisely determined. It has some granularity, i.e. it can only end at 50ms segments (I don't remember the actual time, nor the technical details). If the end does not by chance happen to be at this limit, the rest will be padded with silence (or something similar happens, which causes in effect silence which will be perceived as a faint "click"). Hence, if you convert CDDA (or any audio files which should be played consecutively) into MP3, there will always need to be some workaround to achieve true gapless (i.e. no additional gaps added) playback:

1. While converting, don't encode according to the actual track limits but "shift" the track ending (i.e. pad with beginning of next track instead of silence and start the file representing next track likewise "late")
2. Add metadata which says where the track actually ends (how much "padded silence" has been added by the encoder).
3. Some kind of autodetection (guess if silence at end is caused by the encoder, and if so, skip it)

Option 1. can work more easily with any player, but the ending and beginning of tracks will be shifted (albeit the difference is small, the tracks don't represent the originals anymore). The second option needs be support by the player - it needs to understand the metadata. 3rd option is hacky and may be error-prone, but if you know the MP3 encoding details and what kind of silence to expect, and implement accordingly, it should be quite reliable (?).

Honestly, I'd steer away from MP3 for just this reason (there are many others). If you have your original CDDA then re-rip the audio. If you need MP3 for other devices, you probably need to use option 1.

The feature could be added (maybe or maybe not as a plugin) but considering the feature needs to be added by some enthusiast who can also do some programming, and many enthusiasts will choose some other file format whenever possible, the likelihood of implementation... well I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but it's quite small.

If you don't have the original lossless audio... then tough luck. It's a hot mess to get working reliably with any player if your files are ... from many different sources, with different kinds of encoders. Getting OT, but I would not trust the quality of rips I have not made myself, and gapless would be the least of my concerns....

Corssfade is indeed very different and undesireable.