hi group,
the subject says it all. I encode with lame 0.91exe with vbr standard setting. The playing time is displayed incorrectly within the players. Is there something to do beside leve it, love it or wait?
Thanks in advance
Harald

If you use WinAmp, try MAD-decoder:
http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/

Thanks for the tip, but I would like to stay native M$, because the playing time would be useful in other programms I use (videoediting and BPM Studio).

If these files contains tags try removing them.

(Unlikely, but I'll mention it anyway)

Are you sure that the Xing VBR header isn't messed up/missing?

Edit: Unlikely isn't spelled Unlkikely

Thanks for the tips! I tried id3kll and vbr_head and nothing helped.
I think it is not a problem only I have, so nothing to do with my hard- and software.
Media Player reports 400kBs for the songs (which are around 200kBs). So my guess is that the playing time is computed by dividing the filesize by the bitrate. All the tags and headers were ereased and the time was still wrong.
What is your expirience soundwise between cbr and vbr at about 192 kB?
Harald

vbr_head?
Do you have an adress for that program



You should have correct VBR headers for VBR files, not none

Maybe this freeware program (VBRFIX) can help.
http://www.willwap.btinternet.co.uk/programs/vbrfix.htm

here the links:

http://www.headstrong.de/software-id3kill.shtml

http://webclub.kcom.ne.jp/ma/takabin/eng/vbrheader.html

regards
Harald

Thanks to YinYang!
That seems to solve the problem. I tried it with one file and it worked. I want to test it further bevor I process all my files.
regards
Harald

You're welcome. So the problem is that LAME in your case doesn't write the VBR header. Is the -t switch somehow enabled?
What are your switches and what frontend might you be using?

the problem is not lame or the mp3 files.its ms mediaplayer. it will play the vbr files corretly, but can not read vbr tag info.

Absolutely. Quite a while ago, I e-mailed Robert Hegemann about it, but he told me he had received no reports of this problem except mine, so he suggested that it might have been some other problem with my system. I don't think so.

If I encoded VBR MP3s with LAME, the bitrate/time fields were correct on every MP3 player except Windows Media Player (fine on WinAmp, fine on UltraPlayer, fine on Media Jukebox, etc.) When I used vbrfix on those MP3s, the display was correct in WiMP too.

It doesn't really matter to me anymore, because I don't use WiMP anymore, but I still think M$ should have fixed it by now.

As a side note: VBR MP3s created with Xing did show the correct time and bitrate on WiMP.

It is quite a while ago that I did those test and had the e-mail conversation with Robert. I'm not at home now so I can't check my e-mail archive, but was definately more that a year ago. I don't know if things got fixed in later versions of LAME or WiMP, but judging from hdave's post, apparently not.

When I put Show Details on in on a file list in XP I get the wrong play length for MP3s also.