Incorrect VBR header = song length wrong. Fix how?

Hi, people.

I've discovered that some of my older rips, using older versions of LAME, have incorrectly calculated the length of song and bit rate information in the VBR 'header'. I've searched the FAQ, I've searched the BBS, but I can't find anyone who knows how to solve this. There must be a program out there to do it, though... any suggestions?

Have fun,

Paul

VBRFix should work, linked from the FAQ here.

It fixed some of my older lame encoded files with problems.

MP3 Tag Studio will fix a lot of these. The small fix program linked in the FAQ is supposed to be specific to XING - it wouldn't do anything to my files.

Bruno

Yep, I use MP3 Tag Studio for this too.

Hmmm... I fixed several files with bad headers in MP3 Tag Studio and emplode didn't like some of them at all. I had to use VBRfix to get emplode to play nice with all the files.

Perhaps this is a bug in emplode(?), but I could not find a pattern to the files it did not like.

If you ripped the files as VBR with Musicmatch (or something else that uses the FhG encoder), it will output a VBRI header, rather than a Xing header.

MP3T/S can screw up slightly and output a malformed frame containing the Xing header and the VBRI header. This causes emplode to barf on that file.

I've forwarded some relevant information to the author of MP3T/S, and he's looking/looked at it. I haven't heard since, though.

If this doesn't sound like your problem, then I suggest that you contact me privately, and we'll discuss how to get one of the broken files to me, and I'll take a look at it.

Ah, yes, I had noticed that MP3TS and VBRFix handled the files differently. Good to know that the MP3TS author has been notified of the issue.

Actually, I used EAC and LAME 3.91(?) with the new alt preset.

I fixed the files using a Hex-Editor to strip out ALL of the headers (not bad for a dumb artist). For some reason, I could not find a utility to do this that worked 100%. I did notice "Xing" in the junk I stripped. Are there any ways to detect a VBRI header?

I retagged the file (Mp3T/S) and used VBRfix to add the header. This combo made emplode happy.

So do you want the file?