So I finally got some music on my riocar and a couple songs come up "invalid mp3 file" on the riocar display and won't play. These songs are downloaded, not ripped by me, but they work just fine on my computer. Is there a way to find out if riocar will call them "invalid" before I spend the time downloading them to the unit?

possibly a mp3pro file?

Here's a FAQ entry on the subject. Try MP3Trim as is mentioned.

Which software version are you running? 1.03 and 2.0x use different playback engines. A file that plays fine on one engine might not work on the other and vice-versa.

Please save a copy of one of the "bad" files. If it will play in WinAmp, but won't play on the 2.0x software, please e-mail support and see if they want a copy of the file to analyze it.

When I had 1.03, my player froze due to a bad mp3. A reboot wouldn't help it either. I had to upgrade to 2.7 to get it working. Now when I play a bad mp3 it just says "invalid format" or something like that, but it doesn't freeze.

True, it does not freeze now (it pauses with 'Invalid MP3' popup message, so one just skips the offending tune and hits 'play'), but it seems to me that the new decoder is much more 'picky' than the old one.

One possible cause is that the ID3 tag is too long. I had album art on a bunch of my MP3s and this caused the decoder to choke. Wonder if the empeg guys could fix that?

It might be fixable now -- if it's down to a bogus 'offset' field in the *1 file. Just right click on the offending track, and hit "Reset Metadata". Then hit sync. This'll reset the offset to zero. The next time you download from the player, it'll ask if you want to fix that track. Say yes, and it'll go looking for the MP3 data to update the 'offset' field.

However, if your album art is _too_ big, you'll have to wait for the next beta for this to work correctly.

I believe it's the latter problem (too big).

So, am I wrong in my understanding of your post that the new beta will be able to handle the larger ID3 metadata?

To clarify:

Peter recently fixed an issue where big album art would break the import mechanism. This fix will make it into the next public beta.

If you want to recalculate the MP3 offsets for files already on the player, you'll need to use the method I outlined. Since it uses the same mechanism internally, you'll have to wait for the next beta for this to work, too.

I'm not sure what was wrong, but mp3trim fixed it. Thanks for the responses.