Hi,

I have a weird problem with a bunch of MP3 files I copied over from my Mac when I play them in amaroK. When I put one of them in a playlist, the the track length shows up correctly, but when it is actually played, the pop-up thing reports a wildly different track length, and the timer that counts down how much time is left shows the same (wrong) length.

For instance, I have a track by Killing Joke, \"Night Time\", that is 4:58 long. When the track starts, the pop-up says that it is over 33 minutes long. Other tracks have different discrepancies. The tracks play correctly, and the program oves on to the next one right when they end, but they never get submitted to Audioscrobbler.

The only thing I can find that all of the strange tracks have in common is that they are MP3s that were ripped using iTunes 4.x on the Mac.

I\'m using amaroK 1.2.4.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Which sound engine do you use?

Try the beta3 or SVN. 1.3.0 final should be out in a few days.

Looks for me like a MP3 with variable bit rate (VBR). I also have some files with VBR that show this behavior (and so mess up the scoring).
You could try to reencode them (decode and encode).

marcel wrote:

Looks for me like a MP3 with variable bit rate (VBR). I also have some files with VBR that show this behavior (and so mess up the scoring).
You could try to reencode them (decode and encode).

All my files is mp3 VBR, encoded with LAME. I use Xine engine and TagLib 1.4
Maybe you should try another engine, if it is the engine witch checks how long the file is?
Edit: Forgot to tell that amaroK reports the length correct, and has always done.

Post edited by: mortiferus, at: 2005/08/13 17:08

In fact there are VBR encoded mp3s out there (pretty old ones though) which produce problems in mp3 players. Was a header thing AFAIK and is not present anymore with recent encoders.
But it looks like taglib gets the length correct while the engine does not.

I have a song here decoded with VBR (years ago). Taglib says: 156KBps (also xmms)
mp3info says: 48KBps (also mplayer does so).

Hmm, I cannot find a second VBR track at the moment to test if it is a general problem (I know VBR oggs work fine). If it is a general problem, it is not amarok\'s fault but the engine\'s one.

Marcel

Thanks for the responses. I had been using the Xine engine; switching to GStreamer seems to have made the problem go away!