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Does Rockbox support gapless playback?

April 26, 2017gapless playback rockbox support

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Does Rockbox support gapless playback?

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The answer to this question is a qualified “Yes.” MP3s were not designed to be played back gaplessly; this is a limitation inherent in the MP3 format. MP3 stores data in frames that contain 1152 samples (48/44.1/32 kHz sample frequency) or 576 samples (24/22.05/16/12/11.025/8 kHz sample frequency). Since the length of a song rarely corresponds exactly to a whole number of frames, MP3 encoders “pad” the end of the final frame in the song with additional samples. Unfortunately, most MP3 encoders do not store any information indicating what is padding and what is supposed to be part of the song. Thus, it is impossible for an MP3 decoder to play back an MP3 file gaplessly with two exceptions: (1) LAME 3.90.1 and higher stores information about the exact file length in the header (the LAME tag), thus allowing us to calculate which parts of the final frame are padding and to disregard those samples on playback. (2) LAME and maybe other encoders allow to encode an album in a way that the song