Bug 380441

Hello, currently there its no support for custom audio settings like gapless playing or cross fade.
Before working on this, I will implement support for ReplayGain. So, you have to be patient our do it yourself. I will be happy to help you in this case.

I'd love to but unfortunately I haven't got any programming skills whatsoever. Best I can do is report bugs and nice-to-haves I guess. Anyway Elisa looks very promising! Thanks for your efforts!

https://phabricator.kde.org/T7531 has been created to not forget your feature request.
Sorry for the waiting time but we keep an eye on this.

Thanks! If there's something (except for programming unfortunately) I can help you with, please let me know.

It's been 5 years since this bug was created, but I don't lose hope that one day someone with the necessary knowledge will solve it. In any case, I find it curious that you can read on the Elisa Wiki in the Goals section that the development is "Focused on music player (managing your music collection is not a development priority)"¹; but you indeed can manage a music library, can generate backgrounds with a nice blur effect from the cover art, and other miscellaneous stuff like song ratings, etc. but can't properly play an album like The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) in 2022.
Is there any update on this?
Anyway, thanks for all the work!

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1. https://community.kde.org/Elisa#Release_Plans

Some information:

So there are two backends to make sure that Elisa can play music on any platform.

I wanted to try to quickly exchange the media player with one that has already loaded the next song. I started implementing this in the QMediaPlayer backend because I thought that one was used on Linux. However, I quickly noticed that my development setup uses the libvlc backend. So I looked if I could implement it for the libvlc backend instead.

If you use the original VLC media player application to play a music playlist there still is a gap between songs. That makes me think that if even VLC doesn’t manage to implement gapless playback with their own library it probably isn’t really possible to have gapless playback using their library.

Nevertheless, I looked a bit at the libvlc API to see if there is anything but it didn’t seem to me like the quickly exchanging would be possible there.

Just now I had the idea of searching for “vlc gapless playback” and found https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=144695.

There they confirm my suspicions: “It’s pretty clear (from the developer comments on the problem) that implementing gapless support continues to be incredibly difficult and that it presents some complex problems in a multithreaded environment.”

So yea, it seems really hard to implement this even if one has months of time and the necessary funding at hand. And even if it was fixed for the libvlc backend it wouldn’t be fixed for the other backend yet.

BTW gapless support may appear at some point in the VLC 4 timeline (https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/merge_requests/94). But then there is not really any expected release date for VLC 4.0, and the comments on that MR suggest that the feature may end up being pushed into a later version of VLC anyway.

But hopefully with Qt6 using ffmpeg as the default multimedia backend we can drop the VLC backend and then gapless can be implemented as two overlapping media players, as you suggested.

*** Bug 474595 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 476681 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This is in my opinion the most important feature to implement in order to be considered as a true and solid media player. Some others do it, some do not...but in any ways very important for Elisa to be adopted. Currently, i do not because of this, deadbeef does it, and far to be perfect but better for 2 things : gapless and much better cover art search.