Notices

I'm curious about the possibility of gapless MP3 playback on the N800. Neither Canola nor the built in Media Player currently supports it. It appears that both are atomically track oriented - that is, each track is opened, buffered, decoded, played and closed before moving on to the next. The resulting silence (and sometimes clicks) between tracks can be disconcerting for material originally mastered as continuous audio, such as classical, live performances, dance mixes, etc.

Most of this problem can be overcome by looking ahead at the playlist queue and overlapping the decodes for a smooth transition from each track to the next without closing the stream. There are some quirks involving frame granularity in the MP3 standard, but the popular LAME encoder provides a metadata workaround, and other software tricks exist for the edgy cases. Foobar2000 (Windows only) and SlimServer (multi platform) are successful examples.

An overview of the issue and available solutions appears in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_playback

There's an MPD client for the 770 (and possibly the N800), but that solution seems designed to access a remote music library. Although that's part of the puzzle, I'm hoping for something self contained.

Discussion, anyone?