By the way, something I've wondered about song length and VBR...

When I was writing my GapKiller utility, I based everything on frames. I discovered from reading the header specs here that the length of "air time" occupied by a given frame is the same across the file. Even if the frames are different sizes because of different bit rates, their timespan is always the same. For 44khz joint stereo 16-bit files, that time frame works out to about .02612 seconds.

Well, if that's true, then why do we even need VBR synch headers? Shouldn't a piece of software simply be able to index into the file based on the frames? That's what GapKiller does. It does everything by walking through the file one frame at a time.

Maybe that's what WinAmp and Media Player do, and why they don't have a problem displaying files with bad VBR headers?