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Concept
Gapless playback
Summary
Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts (than timing-related ones) at track boundaries should not be severed either. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio. The absence of gapless playback is a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks are meant to segue into each other, such as some classical music (opera in particular), progressive rock, concept albums, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.
Various software, firmware, and hardware components may add up to a substantial delay associated with starting playback of a track. If not accounted for, the listener is left waiting in silence as the player fetches the next file (see harddisk access time), updates metadata, decodes the whole first block, before having any data to feed the hardware buffer. The gap can be as much as half a second or more — very noticeable in "continuous" music such as certain classical or dance genres. In extreme cases, the hardware is even reset between tracks, creating a very short "click".
To account for the whole chain of delays, the start of the next track should ideally be readily decoded before the currently playing track finishes. The two decoded pieces of audio must be fed to the hardware continuously over the transition, as if the tracks were concatenated in software.
Many older audio players on personal computers do not implement the required buffering to play gapless audio. Some of these rely on third-party gapless audio plug-ins to buffer output. Most recent players and newer versions of old players now support gapless playback directly.
Lossy audio compression schemes that are based on overlapping time/frequency transforms add a small amount of padding silence to the beginning and end of each track.
Official source
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Comparison of audio player software
The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play audio files, with limited or no support for video playback. Multi-media players designed for video playback, which can also play music, are included under comparison of video player software. This section lists the operating systems on which the player works.
Opus (audio format)
Opus is a lossy audio coding format developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force, designed to efficiently code speech and general audio in a single format, while remaining low-latency enough for real-time interactive communication and low-complexity enough for low-end embedded processors. Opus replaces both Vorbis and Speex for new applications, and several blind listening tests have ranked it higher-quality than any other standard audio format at any given bitrate until transparency is reached, including MP3, AAC, and HE-AAC.
Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player (WMP) is the first media player and media library application that Microsoft developed to play audio and video on personal computers. It has been a component of the Microsoft Windows operating system, including Windows 9x, Windows NT, Pocket PC, and Windows Mobile. Microsoft also released editions of Windows Media Player for classic Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Solaris, but has since discontinued them.