So ... I had a few albums in VBR that wouldn't play correctly on my cheap iPod, so I used the "Fix VBR Header" option in foobar to attempt to repair them.

They do now play on my iPod, but the problem is that Winamp now reports their bitrate strangely. Earlier, with the "pre-fixed" headers, the bitrate would show correctly in Winamp and foobar. Now, foobar still shows the correct bitrate (around, say, 220Kbps), but Winamp reports strange values like 80 or 32. What's up with this? Is this a Winamp problem or a foobar problem?

If it's a Winamp problem, how come it showed them correctly before? It also shows the correct bitrate for all of my other files.

Thanks for any help.

well, i don't know about that strange function

every CBR file report errors, and using that functiun corrects them (in f2k)
i don't know about winamp, i don't use it

maybe you should try some more aggressive fun. like "rebuild mp3 stream"

VBR header fixing is for files that report wrong length. (like it says play me, i am 11 minutes long, but it's only 10 minutes). That is what you repaired... It repairs nothing else I believe...

Why on earth are you using two players?

Don't you know the second commandment?
Thou shalt have no other players before Me.

I'm not using two players ... I use Winamp as my player, and foobar as my tagger.

It clearly changed something else ... or Winamp wouldn't be reported different bitrates between the two files (before "fix" and after "fix") ....

And I've tried "rebuild stream," no help there. One thing I did note is that if I remove the entire LAME header with VBRfix, then Winamp reports the correct bitrate once again.

Well, here's what I've found after studying the changes that foobar does to files:

LAME 3.97 itself writes part of the Xing VBR header as follows:


And after applying "Fix MP3 VBR Header" it is changed to:


Note that hex "04 C3" at the end has been changed to "01 C3" This appears to be where the problem is. While foobar still has no problem detecting the VBR bitrate, Winamp then struggles with it. After manually changing that single byte in VBR "fixed" files, Winamp then reports the correct VBR bitrate!

So ... in short, I found the problem and a fix ... but I'd rather not have to manually edit a bunch of files. How can I submit a bug report for this so that the next version of foobar will do this while "fixing" VBR files?

Also to add: If I take a file that was working properly (eg. had not been "fixed"), and change that value from 04 to 01 ... the VBR bitrate reporting in Winamp breaks. So I'm sure that is where the problem is.

Thanks for your thorough debugging. According to the LAME documentation here, a value of 01 means CBR, and values of 03-06 mean VBR, so foobar2000 appears to be doing it wrong according to the spec.

It's been noted and I imagine a fix will come soon.

Great! Thanks Canar. Hopefully we'll see in a fix in 0.9.5.4. If it's helpful at all, all the files I did testing on (where I found 04) were V0 VBR files. Not sure if that makes a difference but thought it was worth noting.

Bug fixed in 0.9.5.4, thanks for the detailed report.

No problem. We need more bug reporters like you around.

Well, everytime I notice something like this I'm sure to investigate and will be sure to report it. Best way to get it fixed!

Thanks for fixing it so fast. Works now.