Traktor Pro 3 - FLAC vs. ALAC - Specific Issues

djcoryminto

By chance I was one of the first to discover about 12 years ago that Traktor, in decoding a FLAC file, cuts off playback of the first 50ms or so (in my estimation its about 49.xxx milliseconds, whereas that missing audio exists just fine in the file itself, and can be heard in other media players and seen in a waveform editor.

So, what I did for years, when encoding a FLAC, I would write 50ms of silence to the beginnings of the files so that when i loaded the song in Traktor, the actual beginning of the file would appear and not be cut off by Traktor - a slight waste of space but a good workaround.

Fast forward 12 years later, and Traktor, according to my experiments, no longer behaves this way with FLAC. However, that is immaterial to me since I have since switched to ALAC, since I use Apple products and iTunes and Apple Music, and want those files in the Apple ecoverse, since Apple does not support FLAC. So the SAME BEHAVIOR in Traktor happens with ALAC, where the first 50ms gets cut off of playback. So, like groundhog day, I am reencoding all of my ALACs and writing 50ms to the beginnings like it's 2011 again.

However, special scenarios exist where I am encoding songs from releases where the songs sort of blend into each other (similar to a DJ mix), and I don't want to write the silence into those files, since if I play them back as a cohesive album/release in any environment other than Traktor, the songs will have those audible 50ms gaps between files. In these scenarios, I will have to either encode said files as ALAC without the added silence and live with Traktor cutting off the beginnings, OR encode as MP3 and deal with the loss in quality.

I know - a rather specific, rabbit hole discussion, but curious if others have experienced this, hoping for a discussion, or your commentary. What are your experiences with FLAC or ALAC in Traktor, and how has that affected your ecoverse outside of Traktor?

djcoryminto

It seems N.I. has fixed the issue with FLAC but somehow didn't apply the same remedy to ALAC. My presumption is that it's a decoder issue, since the missing 50ms provably exists in other media players and wav editors.

lord-carlos

Quickly had to test it .. indeed also happens on windows.

djcoryminto

It seems N.I. has fixed the issue with FLAC but somehow didn't apply the same remedy to ALAC. My presumption is that it's a decoder issue, since the missing 50ms provably exists in other media players and wav editors.