I still use, and like XMMS too. But it does not do gapless, and quite by chance I discovered that flac123 does. That does not help with MP3, of course. But I did some research and found a player called Aqualung which claims to do gapless MP3 -- and it does! It can also be controlled from the console so it just needs to run in the background and I can send files to it and play them from the command line.
By the way, I convert flac files to MP3 with this:--
for i in *flac; do/usr/bin/flac -dfcs "$i" | lame -h -V 5 - "$(basename "$i" flac)mp3"; done
As a classical music listener, gapless playback is very important to me. Most of my music is in FLAC, and I have found that the command-line player flac123 is perfect for my needs; gaps are completely inaudible.
Unfortunately I still have quite a large quantity of music in MP3. I did not encode these - they have been obtained from many sources. I generally use mpg123 to play these, bit it is not gapless. Does anyone know of a player - preferably for the command-line - which will perform gapless playback of MP3 files?
I have used computers daily since 1981. From every one of the media on which my data has been stored, I have suffered loss of that data at some time, with the sole exception of the hard disk. Floppy disks, tapes, CD's and DVD's have all become unreadable after a while, sometimes after 3-5 years, and some in as little as 6 months.
I am not saying that I have never had a hard drive failure; however, when it happened there was plenty of warning in the form of frantic clicking, slow reads and program errors. If I did not already have a backup of everything on that disk, I knew it was time to make one. I had no idea that the CD's on which I had stored a large number of movies over a period of 3 years would by the end of that period be about 10% totally unreadable and 50% recoverable with some effort. Those CD's were in proper storage cases , unused and kept in a cool dark place. And yet they rotted away unseen. I could actually see holes through the reflective film in some of them.
I believe that a hard drive, kept unused most of the time, but run occasionally, is very unlikely to fail. The probability of two such drives failing simultaneously is negligibly small. Therefore my solution is to make backups on two separate external hard drives. As the typical cost of HD storage has now fallen to about 10 cents per GB this is also a very inexpensive method, and of course it is also relatively simple and fast.
Actually, to keep a sense of perspective, it's worth noting that almost 12,000 people must die every day in the US, assuming a stable population of 300 million and a mean life expectancy of 70 years.
I have Virgin ADSL and they are a lot more disgraceful than that. From 3pm until the next 1am I am lucky to get d/l speed better than 10k on bt or ed2k. Sometimes it's even slower than dialup -- I can barely even get my email and dns keeps timing out when I try to use www. I get so frustrated with it I want to scream. 1am until 3pm it works OK. I would vote with my feet in a heartbeat, except that I cannot afford to be even 1 day without email, and if I try to switch I just know I will end up with no service for days or weeks just like last time. And I cannot even find any info on their stupid web site about how to cancel. No email address, not even a phone number, except one for technical (non-)support on a premium rate line, of course...
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I had to check this plugin out: yes, it is here -
http://www.eisenlohr.org/xmms-crossfade/index.html
I compiled it, installed it, tested it - and now I'm back with XMMS again. Perfect gapless playback!
I really do prefer XMMS to all the other players.
I still use, and like XMMS too. But it does not do gapless, and quite by chance I discovered that flac123 does. That does not help with MP3, of course. But I did some research and found a player called Aqualung which claims to do gapless MP3 -- and it does! It can also be controlled from the console so it just needs to run in the background and I can send files to it and play them from the command line.
By the way, I convert flac files to MP3 with this :-- /usr/bin/flac -dfcs "$i" | lame -h -V 5 - "$(basename "$i" flac)mp3"; done
for i in *flac; do
As a classical music listener, gapless playback is very important to me. Most of my music is in FLAC, and I have found that the command-line player flac123 is perfect for my needs; gaps are completely inaudible.
Unfortunately I still have quite a large quantity of music in MP3. I did not encode these - they have been obtained from many sources. I generally use mpg123 to play these, bit it is not gapless. Does anyone know of a player - preferably for the command-line - which will perform gapless playback of MP3 files?
I have used computers daily since 1981. From every one of the media on which my data has been stored, I have suffered loss of that data at some time, with the sole exception of the hard disk. Floppy disks, tapes, CD's and DVD's have all become unreadable after a while, sometimes after 3-5 years, and some in as little as 6 months.
I am not saying that I have never had a hard drive failure; however, when it happened there was plenty of warning in the form of frantic clicking, slow reads and program errors. If I did not already have a backup of everything on that disk, I knew it was time to make one. I had no idea that the CD's on which I had stored a large number of movies over a period of 3 years would by the end of that period be about 10% totally unreadable and 50% recoverable with some effort. Those CD's were in proper storage cases , unused and kept in a cool dark place. And yet they rotted away unseen. I could actually see holes through the reflective film in some of them.
I believe that a hard drive, kept unused most of the time, but run occasionally, is very unlikely to fail. The probability of two such drives failing simultaneously is negligibly small. Therefore my solution is to make backups on two separate external hard drives. As the typical cost of HD storage has now fallen to about 10 cents per GB this is also a very inexpensive method, and of course it is also relatively simple and fast.
Actually, to keep a sense of perspective, it's worth noting that almost 12,000 people must die every day in the US, assuming a stable population of 300 million and a mean life expectancy of 70 years.
I have Virgin ADSL and they are a lot more disgraceful than that. From 3pm until the next 1am I am lucky to get d/l speed better than 10k on bt or ed2k. Sometimes it's even slower than dialup -- I can barely even get my email and dns keeps timing out when I try to use www. I get so frustrated with it I want to scream. 1am until 3pm it works OK. I would vote with my feet in a heartbeat, except that I cannot afford to be even 1 day without email, and if I try to switch I just know I will end up with no service for days or weeks just like last time. And I cannot even find any info on their stupid web site about how to cancel. No email address, not even a phone number, except one for technical (non-)support on a premium rate line, of course...