Hi all,

First post but I've lurked awhile and I'd like to get your feedback on the best way to get some form of gapless playback into the N900. It's the only lack of functionality that frustrates me in an otherwise great device.

Gapless playback is the ability of a media player to seamlessly transition between two audio tracks without a brief gap in sound. Things like DJ mixes, classical music, and live performances usually benefit from gapless playback because it prevents the 1 second interruptions in audio when the track moves from one to the next.

The N900 media player doesn't support gapless playback. Here is the open feature request for it (could use some more votes please ):

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2796

- It seems that the media player drivers or lower-level libraries are not open-sourced, so the community cannot alter them directly. Is that the correct understanding?

- Other players on the N900 don't seem to support gapless yet (VLC, Mediabox, symfonie, have I missed any?). Would it be more productive to lobby for this directly with one of these code bases?

- Are there any development/testing level apps that I've missed that support gapless? The Clementine player looks interesting but it's unclear if there is any plan to port it to the N900.

- Would it make more sense to lobby the Harmattan release for this? The concern here is that the community developed version of Harmattan seems focused on porting existing Maemo 5 functionality as a priority, so gapless playback might sink to the bottom of the stack.

- Would this be better off as a brainstorm page or in the forum for media player?


I've seen a few dead posts and feature requests about gapless playback so I'm hoping to collect and summarize what is possible/practical and then figure out the best way to go. I'm technically inclined but not a developer, so I'm trying to figure out the best role I can play to get this accomplished. These 1 second gaps in mixes are getting old and I want to see what I can help do to get something done.

If anyone is interested in taking on some kind of project like this please let me know (again I'm not a coder but would be interested to see what I can do to help. Internet sleuthing for tech details and money donations for pizza or something? lol).

Thanks...