Topic: Gapless DVD-audio playback question

[yousef]

I'm pretty sure that my player is at fault but before I dump it for a new one please could someone advise as to whether I prepared my disc in the correct way to avoid gaps between tracks?

44.1kHz/24bit audio > split with CDWave (saved as 'alternate 24bit') > wavs dropped into DVD Audiofile 0.60 > image burned to DVD-RW with Nero 6.

I'm fairly certain that all that should be ok but I'd be keen to know if I've done anything to introduce the gaps.

[jlykos]

It may not be the player.  I don't use DVD Audiofile, but does it write as a DVD-A or a DVD-V (video) file?  My player has gaps on the playback of DVD-V discs that I burned on Audio DVD Creator (this program actually burns to DVD-V), but does not on the DVD-A discs that I burn on discWelder CHROME.

[scb]

it writes dvd-a and should play back gapless

[JasonSobel]

it writes dvd-a and should play back gapless

exactly.  I've burned tons of DVD-A discs with the DVD-Audiofile program, and they all play gapless on my Denon player.  most likely, your deck is at fault.

[edtyre]

it writes dvd-a and should play back gapless

No problems here, have been using for quite some time. Gapless.

[yousef]

Thanks for that, everyone.

Shame because this deck is much prettier than most of the models I know to be gapless...

[SparkE!]

What model of player is it?

[yousef]

What model of player is it?

It's Samsung DV950.

Just picked up a Pioneer (which I know to be gapless) cheap on Ebay.

[SparkE!]

What model of player is it?

It's Samsung DV950.

Just picked up a Pioneer (which I know to be gapless) cheap on Ebay.

That's probably the problem.  I have a Samsung DV-HD841 that also will not play DVD-Audiofile discs gaplessly.  You can make discs that WILL play gaplessly on your player if you add a photo slideshow, even if it is only one image in the slideshow.  Minetonka's programs apparently do that by default.  The way it was explained to me is that you get at least their background image when you play the disc.  If DVD-Audiofile did the same thing (placed an image on the screen), then playback would be gapless.

Scott Brown (scb on this board) is the author of the program and at one point he was involved in a discussion about the possibility of adding the slideshow option.  As far as I know, that never happened.  Actually, it would not need to be a fully featured slideshow option.  It would just need to be a slideshow with at least one picture that plays as the audio is played.  It could be something as simple as a logo for Audiofile.  It would be cool to be able to add a repeating loop of show pics, but a single image would fix the gap problem with most of the low cost DVD-A players out there, at least the ones built on the basic Toshiba/Samsung platform.  Toshiba was one of the companies behind the original DVD-A format and they are the OEM supplier of parts to other companies such as Samsung that offer low cost DVD-A playback solutions.

Please note that I might have some of the details of this wrong.  I'm going from memory (about 6 to 8 years ago?) and have not taken time to re-research everything before making this post.

[yousef]

Very interesting - I'll have a tinker around with some other software and see if I can get this to work.

Many thanks.

[scb]

there have been updates to the underlying command line dvd-audio tools that are in dvd-audiofile.  I just haven't gotten around to testing it all out and modifying my program to use the newer verisons.  the author of the command line programs is on this board (libfab I believe).  He also has his own front end here:

http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net/GUI.shtml

I haven't tried it yet since I don't believe there's a verison for the mac, but if you're on a windows machine, maybe his GUI will do a "picture" slide show now

[yousef]

Well...

I re-authored my DVD using WaveLab 5 to include a static background .jpg and all seems well...

Which is to say that if I press play at the start of the disc, all tracks play through seamlessly. BUT if I cue up track 2, for instance, and then wind back a few seconds into the end of track one (as I initially did when checking for gaps), a short blip occurs as the track number changes.

I wonder if this is to do with some sort of cacheing of the data not happening properly when flitting between tracks.

Anyway, as long as this means that commercial DVD-As and SACDs will play seamlessly, I'm probably good to go. Will have to compare the sound quality between the Samsung and the Pioneer (when it arrives) and decide which one to keep.

Many thanks SparkE! for the very illuminating post - if there's a DVD-A sticky or FAQ anywhere on TS.com this info should probably be archived there.