Greetings.

I have about 30 mp3 files that all lack VBR headers. This results in audio players that give incorrect lengths when playing them. Some audio players (MPD) even crash when attempting to play them.

Is there a way (using Linux) to add VBR headers back onto these mp3s? I have found mp3 error checking tools on linux, but no luck in fixing these mp3s.

Thank you.

Use foobar2000 with Wine. It has a util "Fix VBR MP3 Header".

The best program I find for fixing MP3's is MP3Packer. I've used it successfully through WINE too.

Haha, funny how both solutions are with WINE. Anyway, I've opted for the WINE & foobar2000 solution. It works pretty well, it made me realise how much I missed foobar2000..

Thanks guys.

(And if there's a purely linux solution, I'd be interested.)

I agree that mp3packer is a great tool. If you just want to add a vbr header to your files, you can use one of the last perl versions of the program.
mp3packer-0.10

~

There's nothing Windows-specific in mp3packer; it's an easy port to Linux:

1. Get OCaml
2. download mp3packer sources
3. type "make"

Instant executable! (it won't copy it to /bin or anything, though... you have to do that yourself)

@Omion: Works like a charm, might have to create a Java GUI to complement it.

A somewhat late reply, perhaps, but I thought it is useful:



Just download the rar, copy the mp3packer.exe binary to a directory in your path and make it executable. Rename it to mp3packer for convenience.

It is a cross-platform binary! The same binary will run on Windows and on Linux. Kudos to the author!

Um... it does?
If that's the case, then I'm a lot better than I thought I was!

The binary depends on various Windows-specific DLLs (the standard things - kernel32.dll and wsock32.dll) so I don't see how Linux could open it without those files.

Do you have WINE installed? WINE is simply a Linux-compiled replacement for those files, so it may be using the WINE libraries to fill in the gaps. Without it, my Linux box gives me:
Well... it's 64-bit Linux, which would be unlikely to run 32-bit code anyway, so I suppose that doesn't say much.

I could have made an explicitly platform-independent version of mp3packer, but that would require a platform-dependent version of "ocamlrun" - the OCaml runtime - which nobody has, so it would be useless.

I have wine installed, and indeed, the bash shell must automatically be invoking wine when launching a windows executable. I found out that lame.exe is equally cross-platform as mp3packer It is nice, however, to discover that wine allows to transparently runs these windows command line tools as if it were linux binaries.


If it isn't, at least it behaves like one.