Aqualung is an advanced music player originally targeted at the
GNU/Linux operating system, today also running on FreeBSD, OpenBSD and
Microsoft Windows. It plays audio CDs, internet radio streams and
podcasts as well as soundfiles in just about any audio format and has
the feature of inserting no gaps between adjacent tracks.

Pick a song that you know really well, something that's in your bones
like Siberian Khatru. Grab it from CD using cdparanoia to have it as a
WAV file. Now open your favourite wave editor and slice the file up into
multiple consecutive sections. Be careful not to insert silence, delete
samples or alter any sample data. Save the slices to separate files. Now
convert the sample rate of some pieces to random values (the example
program shipped with the libsamplerate library will let you do this in
very good quality). Pick some pieces and convert them to Ogg Vorbis
format. Pick some others and encode them to FLAC. Pick a few and convert
them to MONO. Now open up the Playlist editor of the music player in
question and add the files in order. Push play, and listen.

Aqualung is a music player designed from the ground up to provide
continuous, absolutely transparent, gap-free playback across a variety
of input formats and a wide range of sample rates thereby allowing for
enjoying quality music: concert recordings and "non-best-of" albums
containing gapless transitions between some tracks. (Multiple movements
long compositions are often broken into separate but gaplessly flowing
tracks when mastered to CD.) Obvious examples are The Song Remains The
Same (Led Zeppelin), The Dark Side Of The Moon (Pink Floyd), and
Yessongs (Yes). Besides the ability to play the music from these records
without a defect, Aqualung provides high quality sample rate conversion,
a feature that is essential when building large digital music archives
containing input sources conforming to various standards. Aqualung
passed our test -- and it will pass yours, too.
