[gmic]

Hi gurus,

my mp3 files with variable bitrate stop too early - looks as if xbmc does not read / calculate the duration correctly for vbr files.
This problem only occurs with xbmc 12 frodo, everything works fine with xbmc 11 eden.
My platform is ubuntu 12.04.

Any ideas how to fix this?

Thanks!

[arnova]

This is probably caused by the fact that your MP3 has no or a bad Xing VBR header which isn't read properly by taglib (Eden didn't use Taglib at the time). At this point there isn't much we can do to fix this type of files unfortunately.

[gmic]

Thanks for the explanation!
I fixed this by using vbrfix for all my vbr-mp3s - now the headers are correct and frodo uses the correct mp3 length.

[Morsego]

Hi,

Some months ago I faced similar problem and added the Xing Tag to all my MP3 VBR files.

Anyway, I discovered another issue! Everything is fine when playing MP3 VBR files with XingTag but all becomes messed up when SEEKING in them! The longer the MP3 is, the bigger the problem is too

Typically, take a 8min+ (I've tested up to 15min tracks) MP3 VBR file, start to play it and then "Fast forward" (x2, x4, whatever) far enough to reach 2/3rd of the length and then press "play" to listen. If you know the track very well then you notice that the music you ear is not the music the timeline is at. Sometimes, when you press "play", it shows the current position but plays the music from the begining!

Furthermore, once it reaches the track length (ie: 8:12), the music is "shifted" as this is clearly not the right position nor the real track end but XBMC stops the play and skips to the next track.

Some kind developper could take a look at this please? XBMC is the only player I know to mess up with MP3 VBR files so badly so a fix would be a nice addition :-)

[arnova]

You could try using MP3Diags and see whether it does a better job adding the XING VBR Header. Could you also provide a debug log? It could show what's going on...

[Morsego]

Hi Arnova,

I didn't know of MP3Diags and this is a very nice piece of software! Indeed, there are things that do not please MP3Diags and most notably the "bc" warning which may be the culprit in my case... The warning "bc" stands for "Frame count mismatch between the Xing header and the audio stream". It may explain why the correct length is shown in XBMC but seeking is messed up. I'm going to deeply dig into that, thank you very much for pointing MP3Diag tool!

All my music collection is originally in OGG (quality 8 ~262kbps) and I use a custom made script to convert it to MP3 for use in XBMC as the MP3 support is way better (embeded album art most notably) than for OGG. I currently use that command line :

Code:

gst-launch-0.10 --quiet filesrc location="MUSIC.OGG" \
  ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! lamemp3enc quality=0 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux \
  ! filesink location="MUSIC.MP3"

Which produces the highest quality possible MP3 files (~320 VBR files) and with GStreamer copying all the OGG tags to MP3 tags. Every other player I use (VLC, Clementine and DeadBeef) is pleased with these MP3 files and they all seek flawlessly within them, that's why I thought XBMC was the faulty one

The only real difference I see between these players and XBMC is the way they seek : XBMC fast forwards while all the others make jumps (small or big but still jumps). I don't know if it make a difference.