Public Listening Test [2010], Item Selection
Reply #33 – 2010-03-14 00:36:30
Well, the following is about gaps, I know it is offtopic here but I don't know where to answer: I did a very short & very simple test after googlebot's post, I encoded my lossless Pink Floyd - 1973 - The Dark Side Of The Moon rip to Nero AAC V1.5.4.0/quality 0.55 with F2K V1.01 & I listened between track 5 & 6 to see if I could hear anything bad, either added silence or a glitch. TRACK 05 AUDIO TITLE "Money" PERFORMER "Pink Floyd" INDEX 01 19:24:35 TRACK 06 AUDIO TITLE "Us And Them" PERFORMER "Pink Floyd" INDEX 01 25:56:35 With the tags created during the encoding I couldn't hear any glitch. Now I deleted the tags with Mp3tag v0.45a & re-listened to the transition between track 5 & track 6, & guess what ... now without tags there is an audible glitch ... I don't know if this is an issue with Mp3tag but all I know is that this very simple test (It takes less than 5 min) shows that losing the gapless playback metadata information by misstake is actually very easy with the actual Nero trick ... so as long as a simple tag edition will end in the possibility of losing gapless playback personnaly I will not use AAC for music. (I may use it with video as gaps are not an issue there) Even if there is a standard for this one day & even if it is a trivial task to convert the actual metadata trick to this future standard ... it is actually so easy to lose this information that you may have lost it before a more robust standard exist. My dream lossy codec is an MPEG ISO standard codec that achieve the quality of Nero AAC, with a native gapless support as good as Vorbis/Musepack (gapless directly in the specification). The actual tag trick is not satisfying for me. In the future this issue may lead me to re-use Vorbis while I know from my listening tests that Nero AAC beats Vorbis qualitywise. Actually I only use lossless in order to avoid choosing between plague & cholera ...