Gapless playback for mplayer (Linux)

mplayer (or its GUI cousin, gmplayer) does not natively support gapless playback, which is what you want when playing sources which have songs crossing track boundaries (classical and some modern music). In my experience the buffering Linux provides for named pipes is sufficient to bridge the gaps.

So the idea is to make mplayer output PCM data to a named pipe and use aplay to play the result. The sample rate and format have to be known, because we have to disable wav headers which otherwise cause clicks. There is a noticeable delay if you try to use the controls to skip forward or backward.