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#1
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seek tables for MP3s?
Is it possible to create MP3s with seek tables? I've seen just very brief
references to them, usually in connection with Shorten or FLAC. I use FLAC format extensively, but for some recipients MP3 is really warranted. The main use I would have for seek tables with MP3 is that such a thing would allow taking a whole concert or other multipart program, and making it available with divisions to which the listener could skip, but without the audible gaps that would occur in listening to a succession of MP3 tracks. Is there a program out there that could take a group of WAV files making up a concert, and join them together, encode a large MP3 for the ensemble, and include a seek table with pointers to the original file transitions? A related question would be: How many popular MP3 players (software mainly, but hardware, too) work with seek tables? |
#2
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RWG wrote:
audible gaps that would occur in listening to a succession of MP3 tracks. Those gaps are a matter of your player, not the MP3 files. Adjust its configuration or switch to one that allows a zero-length inter-track gap. |
#3
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Those gaps are a matter of your player, not the MP3 files. Adjust its
configuration or switch to one that allows a zero-length inter-track gap. I don't think it's that simple. You may be able to eliminate the actual dead space--there are plugins that supposedly do that, and they probably do. Even so, when you've encoded a bunch of separate MP3 files, the nature of the encoding process means that there will not be a seamless transition from one track to the other, since the adjoining tracks were processed independently of each other. So there will be an audible discontinuity, even if there's no dead space. So I'm back to wanting to combine a set of WAV files (that were split seamlessly from a larger original), create a single large MP3, but retain track length information and put it in a seek table. Is that doable? Is it being done? |
#4
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RWG wrote:
So there will be an audible discontinuity, even if there's no dead space. If the player is intelligent enough to preload the new data stream, and if the break occurs in such a way that the after-decoding last byte and first byte are reasonably continuous -- which shouldn't be hard to achieve -- it _ought_ to be possible to play straight through. Worst comes to worst, a bit of interpolation could be applied to the waveforms and any error would be sufficiently momentary not to be noticed, much like error recovery on CDs. I really think this is a player issue, not a data issue. |
#5
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RWG wrote:
Is it possible to create MP3s with seek tables? I think what you are asking about is more commonly known as cue lists. I've seen just very brief references to them, usually in connection with Shorten or FLAC. I use FLAC format extensively, but for some recipients MP3 is really warranted. The main use I would have for seek tables with MP3 is that such a thing would allow taking a whole concert or other multipart program, and making it available with divisions to which the listener could skip, but without the audible gaps that would occur in listening to a succession of MP3 tracks. That's known as a cue list when applied to .wav files. Is there a program out there that could take a group of WAV files making up a concert, and join them together, encode a large MP3 for the ensemble, and include a seek table with pointers to the original file transitions? The way this is commonly done is to create a single .wav file that has an imbedded cue list. The boundaries of the component .wav files are in the cue list. Some CD burning software builds the proper structures on a CD, when the CD is burned from the .wav file that has the imbedded cue list. Programs like Audition provide the means for both creating the cue list and burning a CD from .wav files with imbedded cue lists. CD burned this way are burned using a standard feature called "Track at once". The entire disc is composed of one file, and cue points are used by the CD player to access the boundaries of the individual .wav file that were concatenated to create the actual .wav file that was used to burn the disc. A freebie called Cuelisttool can be downloaded from http://www.stefanbion.de/cueltool/index_e.htm , and helps imbed and manage imbedded cue lists. The web site also contains some helpful technical information about using cue lists. A related question would be: How many popular MP3 players (software mainly, but hardware, too) work with seek tables? A few posts like this one http://forums.etree.org/viewtopic.php?p=7551 and web sites like this one http://www.true-audio.com/codec.format mention seek tables and programs that support them. |
#6
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"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
... RWG wrote: Is it possible to create MP3s with seek tables? I think what you are asking about is more commonly known as cue lists. I know about cue lists, although I've not yet used them. The editor I normally use (GoldWave) has that feature. I think it might be useful in creating a single WAV file that an MP3 decoder could use, IF it could make MP3s with embedded cue points, seek tables, or whatever they might be called. IF they existed. However, a bit of poking around did not reveal any references to seek tables, or anything like that, as a feature for MP3s. They ARE frequently mentioned for Shorten and FLAC, but I don't feel compelled to use them for that purpose, because playing through a set of FLAC, Shorten, or WAV files doesn't produce the kind of discontinuties to which I was referring anyway. IAC it doesn't look like you can do what I was talking about for MP3. And BTW/IAC Windows Media Player has no support for such a thing, so even if such a feature exists it isn't mainstream, so the benefits of using it to send MP3s to others would presumably be very limited--again, that is, if I could do it in the first place. Maybe when some successor to MP3 becomes popular, this idea may have some potential. |
#7
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If the player is intelligent enough to preload the new data stream, and
if the break occurs in such a way that the after-decoding last byte and first byte are reasonably continuous -- which shouldn't be hard to achieve -- it _ought_ to be possible to play straight through. Worst comes to worst, a bit of interpolation could be applied to the waveforms and any error would be sufficiently momentary not to be noticed, much like error recovery on CDs. I really think this is a player issue, not a data issue. All I can tell you for sure is that when I've used Gapless, there were still audible discontinuities in concert material, though they were less evident than without it. Things like Gapless are easy to do, so probably worthwhile. But I still think there will be some audible artifacts. IAC the kind of thing (on the encoding end) to which I referred does not seem to exist, so at this time there's no need to concern myself with it further. |
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