Hello,
I'm relatively new to lossy audio compression, so please excuse me, if my question seems trivial:
I encoded a rather large (45 minutes) wave-file to mp3 using Lame 3.92 and different variable bitrate options (alt-preset extreme, r3mix, ...). Although the total time displayed in Winamp's playlist is correct, the current time position is calculated wrong, when I jump to a later part of the file (up to approx. 5-6 seconds). This is not the case with CBR or MPC-encoded files.

Any help is appreciated,
Continuum

With CBR files, the player knows excactly where to seek in the bitstream because the datarate is constant.

This isn't the case with VBR files however (the bitrate varies), so the player uses the Xing tag which specifies 100 seek points within the file, but this method isn't entirely accurate. Hence you can't make accurate seeks.

I find this problem especially annoying when you have entire albums in one MP3 file, and use MP3Cue for seeking (via cuesheet). Seeking can be many seconds off.

There isn't really a whole lot that can be done about this (nothing afaik).

Actually, mp3cue does have an option on it's context menu to determine the exact seek points by scanning the whole file and storing the offset in bytes back into the cue sheet. Worked pretty handily on the mp3 albums that I had.

Wow... never noticed that.

Upon usage, I was greeted with the following dialog however:

[img]ea019cff84[/img]

Hmm..
I just downloaded the newest version of mp3cue (0.94) and get the same info box, I guess we have to wait for the future then.
MPC-files are displayed correctly, BUT they take some time to seek on large files. (only sometimes noticeable, I'm not sure why and when this is happening)

Continuum