"Invalid MP3"

Why is that now there are "invlaid mp3" and they wont play. Before they would, now ... they wont. Is there any way to fix this. Ive been finding alot of mp3 now that are "invalid mp3" and i dont have a copy of them no longer. Please help im about to blow a fuse.
-Jordan

The code was rewritten so that it will simply skip files that aren't valid MP3 files. This is to prevent certain "bad" files from locking up the unit (as they have done in the past). Perhaps this new code is too stringent, and it is interpreting a file with minor frame troubles as being fully bad.

Do you have copies of at least some of these files on the PC? If so, there are some things you can check on them.

1) Do they have ID3V2 tags in them? Some player software won't support ID3V2, interpreting those frames as invalid.

2) Open the files in MP3Trim (click to get the software if you don't already have it) and look at the various properties under the "Advanced Info" button. Does it show any frame errors or truncated frames?

If you can find out exactly what it is about the files that's causing the player to choke on them, perhaps you can feed that information to Empeg. Maybe even send them a copy of one of the offending files (for diagnosis purposes only, of course).

Another possibility is that you could be having hardware troubles with the Empeg hard disk. Empeg folks, can you give tips on diagnosing hard disk problems on the unit?

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

It's very unlikely to be disk problems (fsck is run automatically every few syncs).

As Tony pointed out, Mike introduced file validity code to prevent the player hanging on bad files - a condition that was rather hard to escape from. The code searches for a sychronisation frame and then checks for another sync at the appropriate distance further down the file. If it doesn't find these it throws out the MP3 because there's something wrong with it.

It's possible that the "something wrong" could be certain ID3V2 tags, for which support has not yet been implemented.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the validation code - I've personally listened to at least a couple of hundred tracks on a number of players since Beta10A and none of them have been rejected. As far as I'm aware nobody else has reported a problem.

Rob

It's very unlikely to be disk problems (fsck is run automatically every few syncs).

While I agree that his problem is unlikely to be disk-related, this brings up a question. If it only checks the disk every few synchs, is there an easy way to force the disk check between synchs? (Without loading the developer image, that is.)

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

Pull the power cord out during a sync...

;-)

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

Ok, I'll report the same problem. A number of albums that I borrowed since a friend of mine already had them encoded exhibit this problem. ID3v2 seems like a reasonable hypothesis. I will try to pinpoint this more exactly.

Fly me to the moon...