iPhone / iPad / iOS Users - Gapless Playback Not Working Anymore

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Ger_Stokes

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Hi all,

How many of you use iOS devices to listen to dj sets / live albums? For me, the main reason for starting to use an iPhone was so that I could listen to my music with gapless playback, cant listen to split up dj sets with a pause between each track right?

Well, now it seems that gapless playback on iOS devices is broken now. There's an intermittent bug that I found ages ago that still hasn't been fixed in iOS 8. This only happens on my iPhone and using iOS, this bug is not found when I use my iPod classic or when playing the same albums through iTunes.

I thought it might have been spotted by other iOS users and fixed in iOS 7.1 or at least the current version of iOS 8, but instead it's gotten worse, albums that used to play smoothly between transitions now suddenly pause and jump for a split second when changing from track to track.
What's happening is, I listen to a lot of albums that are continuously dj mixed and play straight through without any pauses between tracks, and I've been experiencing problems a lot now with random split second pauses between tracks and choppy transitions. These albums in question have been ripped from cd using the latest versions of iTunes.

For example,
I'd be listening to an album and it would play gapless and smooth for most of the album, but maybe one or two transitions on the album would have a split second pause between them, and the rest of the album would play perfectly with no pauses, skips or jumps at all.

I've been mailing apple about this and been on the phone to them about it, but they wouldn't acknowledge the problem at first, then they said they heard what I was talking about and would look into it and fix it in a coming update, that was months ago. So I called them again a few weeks ago to see if they can sort it yet and now they saying that they don't support gapless playback anymore, or at least they think they don't?

I think this is total BS, and really found it hard to believe that this was the case, Apple stopping supporting their music player on iOS devices. Seeing as iTunes plays everything smoothly and no gapless issues. I just went out and bought an iPhone 6 for €900 / $1060, and for that money you'd expect it's basic music player to work. It's total BS to think that a top computer software / hardware company would just decide to abandon basic functions in their devices, especially when we are talking about how much Apple takes pride in their products and how much more they charge for them over their competitors.

So this is my next step to try and get this problem seen and out in the open more. The more people who know about it and are aware of the issue, the better.Hopefully more people can get the word around and get this noticed by Apple and finally fixed.

I've uploaded some test files below to show the problem. The files are mp3's and aac, and have been ripped from cd using the latest version of iTunes. The mp3's are the ones with the issue, but the aac play with no problem. If you listen to the transition at the end of track 2 (2-02 Colours (JH Re-Edit)) going into the start of track 3 (2-03 Your Body), you will notice the split second pause / jump. But listen to the aac version and compare it to the mp3 version and you will hear that it plays back fine, just as it's supposed to. Try them in iTunes too and both versions playback fine, no jumps or pauses.
You can download them here, all links have the same files, I just uploaded them to different hosts for other people's choosing...


http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php...32626247919914


https://www.mediafire.com/?w5wvi50er96b14s


Zippyshare.com - iOS Test Files.zip


https://www.sendspace.com/file/lubcmc

I really hope that people can spot this issue too and help get this fixed, I know this gapless playback feature might not be important to some people, but like I said at the start, it's an essential function for me in a music player and I use it on a daily basis when I listen to music. And I thought I'd see how many people here would use it too.
Thanks for reading this long rant of mine, appreciate it.
 

cjmnews

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Gapless was intended for iTunes use, and that is why it works there.

Checking Apple's site: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201644
The iPhone 6 is not listed as a device that can support this, and the article was updated last year.

You could log a bug over at bugreport.apple.com
 

sallenmd

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Jul 9, 2006
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I feel your pain. I've had a number of things Apple has done over the years that really ticked me off. But they don't fix them if they don't think a huge chunk of users care very strongly. I hope for your sake a lot do. As for me, I have never cared about and will never care about gapless playback.
 
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