I've been experiencing a problem in the past few months and wonder if anyone else has noticed this. Last few versions of Foobar2000 up to and including 1.3.17 Beta1 seem to lose first 1-2 seconds of song playback. This only happens from a stop where I double-click on a particular song and output drops the first 1-2 seconds. Does not happen if skipping songs forwards or backwards where there is little time gap between songs. Only happens after a stop and a few seconds has passed by before starting another song. If I double-click on the same song twice in a row quickly, then there is no missing music. Easy to re-create this.
Buffer length at default of 1 second, upping it to 2-3 seconds does not help this.
My library is all FLAC lossless. Some high-res music as well. I've been using Foobar2000 for many years successfully so am very familiar with it and don't recall having this problem prior to a few months ago. I'm using a vanilla installation with only exception of also using WASAPI 3.3 output add-on. This config has worked well for me for years now.
I went back to version 1.3.10 to see if there was a difference and it seems that the problem is less severe with that version.
Is your playback through an external amp with an optical connection?
Not Optical. Playback is over a USB ASYNC connection to Bryston DAC which has very low jitter. I use WASAPI add-on in Foobar2000 to ensure bit perfect output. This arrangement has worked well for many years now, except for the problem noted above.
Sounds as if the DAC takes a while to warm up before it starts playing any audio. The last time I had a device that chopped off audio at the start of the stream was a Windows Sound System compatible Packard Bell Sound Card, which lopped about 100ms off every startup of the audio device, causing, for instance, all of the AOL and GetRight voice clips and sound effects to be cut off a bit. (I didn't actually use AOL, but I tinkered with their sound files. I also used de-noising to clean up the horribly noisy stock voice clips from GetRight, but their staff never got back to me about my de-noising effort. Alas, I've found many better ways to download files now, and I'm certainly not on dial-up any longer.)
foobar2000 doesn't cut-off your audio, unless you have installed a DSP that does that. Perhaps you have upgraded your drivers or the DAC's firmware and that has introduced the problem.
There is a component designed to workaround the very problem your device has. You can give it a try while searching for the cause for the change. It can be downloaded here (http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/foobar2000/?changes=foo_dsp_pregap).
You need to install a Pregap DSP v1.0.2 component for Foobar. In description it says: "Inserts silence before real playback begins. For use with slowly initializing digital receivers." This component inserts silence only in the beginning of the first track, so it maintains gapless playback. This is exactly what you want, I also had this problem and only today I found the solution. But I did not find this component on official Foobar website. I found it here: https://foobar.hyv.fi/?changes=foo_dsp_pregap
You need to install a Pregap DSP v1.0.2 component for Foobar....
Thank you SO MUCH for this... It was driving me crazy and couldn't find a solution... :D
In my case I'm using ASIO4ALL to send to an external dac, and was getting these 1second gap when changing songs and so forth...
But no more!