ITunes on my MAC is perfect. Why NOT for IOS? Spotify, Deezer and Tidal have crossfading with streaming. No, still no crossfade or gapless playback. Gapless playback lets the tracks flow seamlessly, one to the next, without any silence between. Perfect for classical music, live recordings and concept albums. It’s such a useful feature that the new release of Spotify will have gapless ‘On’ by default.

UPDATE Feb 2012: Spotify now has gapless playback!

Below is the original post, written when gapless playback seemed like an impossible dream…

Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks without intervening silence or clicks where the song changes. It’s pretty common on a lot of albums. But gapless playback has been missing from Spotify since the beginning. For two years now, a growing army of Spotify users have been requesting this feature via Spotify’s getsatisfaction forum: it’s the most requested idea by far, with close to 1,000 requests. Spotify claimed that they were “seriously looking into gapless playback” about 9 months ago. So why is this request so popular, and what sort of issues might be preventing Spotify from implementing it?

Back in the day, if you were to put on a vinyl record you’d hear that some songs merge and segue together to form continous music. More recently, if you listened to that album on CD the songs would still be gapless. Popular music playing apps like iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp can also handle gapless playback. But not Spotify.

Listen to, for example, Shpongle’s album “Nothing Lasts… But Nothing is Lost,” where ingenious joins between tracks are integral to the listening experience. But on Spotify there’s always a little gap between each song. Since the songs are so short (it’s a 20-track album) all these breaks can take away from the enjoyment of the music. Listen to a live album, or a DJ-mixed album, or any number of classical albums and the problem’s the same.

On the gapless playback thread on getsatisfaction, there are a lot of vocal users venting their frustration. It frequently descends into flames and sarcasm but users like Dean, Kimmo, Radian and a few others manage to keep it civil and express their views clearly (mostly). Acclaimed music producer Gareth Jones (who has produced bands like Depeche Mode, Erasure and Interpol) also added to the discussion:

“We are only asking that the music should be presented as the artist intended. Many times in the mastering studio we do leave gaps, sometimes we don’t. Those of us in favour of gapless playback merely wish to experience the artists’ intention.”

So why hasn’t gapless playback been implemented in Spotify yet?

Spotify music is encoded in Ogg Vorbis format, which does support gapless playback. So it’s probably not due to file format issues. It may be that additional metadata is required to describe the length of the gap, and perhaps Spotify’s mechanism to convert the FLAC files received from record labels into Ogg Vorbis format cannot handle the extra metadata.

There are reports that gapless playback works on Spotify for SONOS and Squeezebox. If true, then it would seem that the problem lies with the Spotify clients, not the source music files.

But it’s possible that it’s just not worth Spotify’s effort. Most of the users complaining about the lack of gapless playback could probably be described as “audiophiles.” Amongst Spotify’s vast userbase, these discerning music lovers are just a tiny minority amongst the hoards who think 128kbps music sounds just fine. Besides, they say the album is dead now and we mostly just listen to singles and individual tracks anyway, so where’s the incentive for Spotify to invest resources into fixing gapless playback for albums?

/spotify-free-pc-premium.html. Perhaps there are other commercial reasons not to implement gapless playback: the gap might be required by Spotify Free to trigger the audio ads. There were even rumours that the Spotify client deliberately cross-fades tracks in and out to facilitate the ads. If the lack of gapless playback was due to audio ad requirements, I could see how Spotify might be reluctant to reveal this as it could be thought of as unfairly limiting paying user’s enjoyment.

Gapless playback may still be coming soon though. Spotify apk hacked reddit. A Spotify rep said a couple of months ago that “the popularity of the [gapless playback] thread will have an influence on product development.” And Spotify CEO Daniel Ek himself, in response to a question on Spotify’s lack of gapless playback said on Quora that:

“If it is a popular feature request we will add it… We look at and carefully evaluate all of the feature requests people have, but never comment on a timeline. If anything we should have been better communicating that we are looking at this idea.“

The thread on getsatisfaction is now tagged as “The company has this under consideration.”

So while it’s being considered, perhaps you might want to have a listen to one of these albums:

The latest Spotify desktop client update includes the most-requested feature on the support forums: gapless playback! It seems this update was strongly driven by community user requests, as several other new features – crossfading, persistent play queues, hiding of “purchase” buttons – have all been requested by users in the past.

Here’s a brief look at the key new features:

Gapless Playback and Crossfade

Gapless Playback Apple Music

Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks without intervening silence or clicks where the song changes. It’s pretty common on a lot of albums and it’s now enabled by default in Spotify on the desktop:

The implementation of gapless playback is flawless: check out Shpongle’s album “Nothing Lasts… But Nothing is Lost” for one good example. For some classical examples, see the essential spotifyclassical.com. With gapless playback enabled, albums that are supposed to be gapless are played without gaps, but albums that are supposed to have gaps between the tracks retain the gap. So this isn’t some dumb all-or-nothing implementation; Spotify have spent the time to be sure gapless playback is smart and honors the original artist’s intention.

Spotify have had to re-encode their entire catalog to enable gapless: with over 19 million tracks this obviously takes some time, so some of more obscure albums may not have been re-ecoded yet.

Crossfading was another often-requested feature that logically fits in with gapless. With Crossfade Tracks enabled the end of one song fades into the start of the next one, giving you your very own continuous mix. There’s no beat matching or anything fancy like that, so professional DJs will still be able to make a living. You can set the fade time 1 to 12 seconds, but the default value of 5 seconds seems optimal. It’s great for mixed playlists and will be a fun feature for parties. Crossfading is bypassed when you listen to an album sequentially, so there’s no need to constantly manually switch crossfading on and off.

You’ll also notice in the image above that there’s now the ability for UK Premium users to hide those annoying purchase buttons you’d sometimes hit by mistake. Result!

Persistent Play Queue

With the spotlight on gapless playback, you may have missed another great new feature rolled out in this update: a persistent play queue. Also known as the “save and restore feature for Now Playing,” this now means that you don’t lose your play queue when you restart Spotify. It even remembers where you were in the currently playing track so you can pick up listening from exactly where you left off. The history is also retained across sessions (select Play Queue from the sidebar then click the History tab at the top) – for how long or for how many tracks remains to be seen.

Improved Subscribe, Buddy List and Favorites options

The update ticker in the sidebar on the right is now a lot smoother, and you’ll now also see when someone “stars” a song:

Other updates include a drag & drop fix on Windows (I hadn’t noticed it was broken), faster artist browsing, and you can now select View as Album Art from the View menu instead of only using a hotkey. This now works on a per-playlist basis too.

Offline Mode

Premium users can now set Spotify to offline mode (File > Offline Mode). This works like airplane mode on mobile, so you can only listen to offline synched playlists and imported local music files. All network P2P traffic is disabled in offline mode, which may come in handy on a corporate or college network or when using 3G dongles.

Gapless Playback Amazon Music

Personalized Recommended New Albums

The main What’s New page that’s displayed whenever you start Spotify received a huge makeover a few months ago when Spotify Apps were released. While the apps got all the attention, another great new feature was enabled at the same time: a Recommended Albums carousel that’s tuned to your own personal listening habits:

Gapless Playback Spotify

Many thought this was just a random selection of new releases, but it seems that most if not all this small selection is keyed to what you’ve been listening to on Spotify. For example, in the snapshot above you’ll see new releases from Alexander Robotnick, E-Craft, and Deadmau5: all artists I’ve listened to before. This might seem like a coincidence but I’ve been checking this over the past few months and the hit rate is far too high for that. Every artist page in Spotify has a “Related Artists” section that’s driven by Spotify user listening habits, so it seems some of the data from that (or from what you share with Facebook) has been repurposed to generate this small custom selection. I only wish you could expand it from a measly five offerings!

Playlist Subscriber Email Notifications

If you publish playlists, you’ll now receive summary email notifications telling you who’s subscribed to your playlists:

You’ll receive one of these emails each day, depending on how many new subscribers you have. You can of course unsubscribe from the emails at any time (thanks to Spotimy for reminding me of this new feature!)

Gapless Playback Spotify Mac

All-in-all, this is a fantastic set of updates to the core Spotify desktop experience and one that clearly shows Spotify listen and respond to what their customers ask for. I just hope the Android update gets some love now that this is out of the way!