Thursday, February 23, 2012

Spotify's New Feature: Gapless Playback

Today Spotify added gapless playback, probably the most wanted feature among classical fans. If your desktop hasn't been automatically updated, you can get the new version here.


A few examples to showcase this great new feature:

Stockhausen's monumental work for six vocalists and six microphones, Stimmung. Over 70 minutes long, in 51 tracks, now with no gaps in between!

Live albums sounds so much better without gaps. Check out the last three track from Grateful Dead's Europe '72 Vol. 2, one of the most exciting encores ever.

Concept albums are now presently properly too, from What's Going On to Deltron 3030, from The Ninth Wave (the second half of Hounds Of Love) to The Downward Spiral, all those annoying gaps are gone for good.

If the short pause between the third and fourth movement of Beethoven's fifth Symphony made you wanted to bang your head on the desk, rejoice now, those days are gone and gone forever. Listen to The Fifth, or any symphony smoothly as one whole piece of work now. If you don't know where to start, check out my previous post: ABC Classic FM's Classic 100 Symphony.

And yes operas! Finally you can listen to a Wagner piece as three hours of contentious music without interrupting of any kind (provided you've turned off the phone and Twitter). Go search for an opera, or pick up one from my Wagner, Puccini, Strauss, Britten or Mozart playlist.

Electronic music/DJ mixes also benefits greatly from this feature, follow @afront and check out his blog for tips on that. 

All album examples are linked to Spotify. Try it for yourself and look forward to your recommendations.
Posted by ulyssestone at 9:48 PM
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10 comments:

  1. Fantastic news. One of the first operas I tried to listen to on Spotify was this recording of La Fanciulla del West.

    http://open.spotify.com/album/0vopVPqgEI0qEjx0yIwfvF

    I gave up listening to it then because of the gaps, but I'm listening to it now, and I've just gone into track 2 without any join for the first time.

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  2. Will this be available on the Android app?

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  3. One of my favourites things to listen to on Spotify is this recording of Appalachian Spring:

    http://open.spotify.com/user/noihavenotseenpi/playlist/4NJAASBdojslYWYl3t83oo

    Now with gapless it sounds a lot better. This is great.

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  4. Best spotify new for years for classical lovers :)

    Unfortunately, it's not perfect. I often hear small pop/click between each tracks. I'm currently listening Stimmung by K. Stockhausen, and clicks are occuring on each track change :/

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  5. Superb - makes me happier than I can properly express. Thanks for letting us know about this - I had no idea it had been introduced until reading it here.

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  6. Fantastico! This is wonderful news. I was afraid that it had been forgotten about. There are so many places that this makes a difference. I have just listened to the Diabelli variations just as they were played - without the sooooo irritating gap between variations 16 and 17. I know it was only a split second in 30 minutes of music - but it was hugely annoying.

    WELL DONE SPOTIFY !

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  7. Truly Great News! I was afraid that this had been forgotten about.

    It makes so much difference in a wide range of music ( I've just listened to the Diabelli as Serkin played them for the first time!)

    Thanks for letting us know - and also thanks to Spotify for listening to their users.

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  8. I asked on Spotify forums about the clicks, which I hear too. They told me that they had to re-encode the entire library for gapless, and that they are not done with some albums yet, see http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Announcements/Preview-release-Spotify-Desktop-0-8-5-Gapless-crossfade-offline/td-p/6979/page/2 . I don't know if it's true and I wondering how stupid they were not to encode the ibrary for gpaless in the first place.

    ReplyDelete

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