0:00 MP3 Problem?

Asked by shivian (10

) August 28th, 2008

I currently have about 72 mp3s in my collection that are (for some reason) reading as 0:00 in length. They play fine in Winamp, but iTunes won’t even accept that they exist. Any way to easily correct all of these without burning a CD and re-ripping them all? If I open and re-encode them it seems to work fine (with Audacity) but if there’s a simpler way I’d rather do that!

Observing members: 0

Composing members: 0

3 Answers

Why not try adding in the id3 tags for the mp3’s and specifying the length in there. It may be that simple. You can use mp3tagtools to do it. You could write a batch file if you’re in windows or a shell script in linux to grab the id3 tags to get the length of each track and re-write it to each one. It would probably be easier for you to actually do try the mp3tagtools or re-encode them with audacity.

tWrex (1655

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…

Most likely they were encoded with a variable bit rate. iTunes does not deal well with VBR. To fix them you will need to transcode them to a constant bit rate. This is probably what Audacity is doing. If you Google VBR and iTunes you should find some tools to do this in a batch.

iJimmy (869

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…

Sorry tWrex, but the length is not kept in the ID3 tag (I tried checking). Thanks iJimmy, I’ll look into that!

Anyone else experienced this problem?

I am pretty sure I have other VBR songs, so I don’t think that it’s really just these… considering it’ll be like one song out of an entire album that’s 0:00 – and I am sure the album didn’t encode with only 1 song as VBR and the rest normally…

shivian (10

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…