Audacious refuses to play certain mp3s [SOLVED]

seatec · n00b Joined: 05 Jul 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Munich.de

Hi

I just switched from Xmms to Audacious. In Xmms for quite a long time now I had the problem that more than a year ago it stopped displaying the track length for many of my mp3s. As it still played them though, I didn't care much. Now with Audacious, this player refuses to play or even enqueue these tracks. No error messages are given. Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong?
Cheers

seatec

nenolod · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 10:27 am Post subject:

Your MP3s have a corrupted bitstream. XMMS did not care, but audacious does.

- nenolod

seatec · n00b Joined: 05 Jul 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Munich.de

Well what a relief that it cares. Xmms did play them at least. Now what...how to fix them?

ryszardzonk · Posted: Wed Nov 08, 2006 11:41 am Post subject:

Janne Pikkarainen · Posted: Wed Nov 08, 2006 12:37 pm Post subject:

What if you compare the output of file a_working_file.mp3 and file a_broken_file.mp3? Or use some mp3 info showing program, such as mp3info?
_________________
Yes, I'm the man. Now it's your turn to decide if I meant "Yes, I'm the male." or "Yes, I am the Unix Manual Page.".

seatec · n00b Joined: 05 Jul 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Munich.de

mp3info just shows the id3 tag. If I rightclick the file in Konqueror, look for 'properties' and 'metainfo', I see the sampling freq and everything. I can even play it in the 'preview' tab. Audacious still refuses to play it. I was wondering whether those files that don't work possibly have an alternating bitrate, but that shouldnt be a reason for audacious not to play it, should it?

Janne Pikkarainen · Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 12:19 pm Post subject:

What USE flags you have enabled for Audacious? Maybe it's just missing some decoder.
_________________
Yes, I'm the man. Now it's your turn to decide if I meant "Yes, I'm the male." or "Yes, I am the Unix Manual Page.".

seatec · n00b Joined: 05 Jul 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Munich.de

[ebuild R ] media-sound/audacious-1.1.2-r1 USE="alsa arts gnome mp3 nls oss vorbis -aac -chardet -esd -flac -jack -lirc -mmx -modplug -musepack -sid -sndfile -timidity -wma" 0 kB

I'm running pretty much a default install, although it's more than 3 years old by now and like every other Gentoo had it's quirks and problems from time to time. I'm up to date with updates and everything.

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

I don't think it's a bad idea to ignore corrupted mp3s.. I mean, they might contain malicious stuff trying to exploit a buffer overflow, etc. I think what you should look into is how to fix the mp3 rather than convincing any player to play the currupted file no matter what.

Is there any chance that you could re-encode the file again? I don't know any tools for that, maybe someone can suggest something. But there must be something to fix/reencode corrupted files

seatec · n00b Joined: 05 Jul 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Munich.de

I was considering reencoding as well. Problem is I don't know howto sort out the 'bad apples'. If I have to play a file first of all to notice audacious "doesn't like it" , and I'll have to reencode it, I'll be busy for years, running over one of the bad files once in a while.

nenolod · Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 1:41 pm Post subject:

Run your mp3s through mp3check, that should be able to fix them.

seatec · n00b Joined: 05 Jul 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Munich.de

# mp3check -e Hampenberg\ -\ Last\ night.mp3
Hampenberg - Last night.mp3:
2865 bytes of junk before first frame header
valid id3 tag trailer v1.0 found
frame 7916/ 3:26: 2860 bytes of junk after last frame at 0x00328745

# mp3check --cut-junk-start Hampenberg\ -\ Last\ night.mp3
Hampenberg - Last night.mp3:
cut-junk-start: removing first 2865 bytes, retrying
cut-junk-start: no junk found
#

That did the trick. Audacious now plays the file. Thanks a lot everyone, especially nenolod.