Short fade at beginning of songs

[originalroxxy]

Hi everyone!

I'm new here. I'm also new to Poweramp. Less than a month since I started using it on a tablet I use for storing music. It's been bothering me for weeks now why songs have a short fade when it starts. I googled for answers earlier and I found this old thread that has now been archived and closed. I don't exactly understand if it's fixed now or what was the resolution. I also checked my version and it's 976, if that matters. I hope somebody can help me because I've tried and tried and spent the entire day today trying to figure it out in the settings. I don't know if there's actually a fix for it or I'm just dumb.

I hope somebody can help me.

So my problem is this very, very probably half-a-second fade at the beginning of each song. It happens to a lot of songs. Even entire albums. I don't know why. A very clear example would be Britney's "Gimme More" where she has a spoken intro "It's Britney, Bitch" at the very beginning and you literally could only here "Britney, Bitch". In her song "Stronger", there's also a fade that happens in the first verse where there's like one second of silence before she proceeds to continue the next line. The original line is "Hush just stop." and then there's silence before she continues "there's nothing you can do or say baby". In that one second of silence, a fade happens and you could only here "nothing you can do or say baby".

I hope somebody can help me. My music's mostly all m4a. I have all fade settings to lowest (0ms, 100ms, 10ms, 10ms, 10ms respectively). Auto-advance Fading and Manual Track Change Fading both set to No Fading. 

Am I missing something?

[andrewilley]

I believe there may be a very short ramp up from zero to full amplitude when a track first starts (presumably to avoid a possible initial click) but if so we're only talking a few milliseconds.

I've just created a test track with four very short (25ms) 'blips' occurring at zero, 200ms, 400ms and 600ms, and made WAV, FLAC, MP3 and M4A versions. With all crossfading off, you can hear all four blips clearly - except occasionally if you manually start one of the files by tapping on it from the Category list. But if you use repeat, or allow continued playback to advance the tracks, or manually advance, or rewind to the start, all four blips are clearly present in all versions. 

Andre

 

MP3:

WAV:

M4A:

FLAC:

Blips.flac

[originalroxxy]

Hi @andrewilley! Thanks for noticing! So there's been a significant discovery since I posted this thread.

I noticed that the short fade at the beginning only happens when I play music via Bluetooth on a soundbar. The issue doesn't happen if I plugin wired headphones on my tablet or just play music directly on the tablet's speaker. I don't have any other Bluetooth audio devices that I can do some tests on as I gave up on Bluetooth earbuds cos I keep losing them.

 

is there a setting that I need to change for this to not happen via Bluetooth.

[andrewilley]

Those blip test files seem fine via my Bluetooth headset too - apart from, as I said earlier, when you first tap on a new song from the list, when the first 25ms blip can become muted as the file is first played (so you only hear three blips, starting with the one occurring at 200ms into the file).

If I leave all four blip tests running on repeat in a folder (so the four tracks are continuously auto-advancing) all four blips are clearly audible every time. Same if I set one track to repeat.

Not sure if it's a buffering thing with larger files, or just something that your BT device is doing when it starts a new audio session.  Max might be able to comment further on this anyway.

Andre

[originalroxxy]

So another update.  Thank you so much @andrewilleyfor your insight regarding my BT device probably having an issue. I tried to look into it and did some investigating. I still did a lot of testing on the Output Bluetooth section of Poweramp, to no avail. Finally, I tried to play the same songs via Spotify on my sound bar and the issue still persists. I therefore conclude it's my sound bar that's the problem. For some reason, my sound bar eliminates dead air between songs, thus resulting in crossfading. Like it has its own gapless function or something, which is weird because there's no setting like that on the remote. What's annoying is the example I shared earlier about a song having silence/gap in the middle and my soundbar removing that silence/gap between the two verses, thus resulting in crossfading on the first word of the next verse.

I now understand that it is not Poweramp's fault. Hehe.

[andrewilley]

Possibly some sort of power-saving feature in the soundbar? Maybe it goes into a low-power state when there is no detected audio input? I wonder if it happens with gapless track changes too, or just where there's been silence between tracks? Sounds like nothing that Poweramp can do about it though, sorry.

Andre

[originalroxxy]

Hi @andrewilley! I tried to look into it by reading the entire manual. I actually just recently bought this sound bar and have been listening to my music through wired headphones so I only just recently discovered this glitch of sorts. I didn't find anything in the manual about a power-saving option. The remote doesn't have anything as well. 

Thanks so much for all your input. I don't know anything about these things. I'm just someone who loves music but knows nothing about all this stuff. I don't even understand half of Poweramp's features and settings. There's just so many. The app is TRULY powerful. I know eventually I'll understand everything.

Thank you and more power to you and the team! TEEHEE 🧁🍭