I have a few strange mp3s that I guess are corrupted somehow. It will play fine in winamp but in the playlist and the player, the time always shows 0:00. It won't play at all in XMplay. foobar2k seems to play it ok.

another strange thing is when i right click on the file in explorer and go to properties, summary tab and click advanced, there's only a few things listed: music & track number and description & title & comments. usually an mp3 file will have music, description, origin, audio and other characteristics under those four as well (too many to list)

like i said, it's not that big a deal as most players seem to play it ok and i actually decoded it to wav in winamp ok too... i'm just wondering if it's a simple problem that i can fix so it's like the rest of my mp3s... anyone else came across similar mp3s? is it something wrong with the tag or header or something?

Play time is calculated using the MP3 header, generally it can be calculated using information in the audio header, in the case of Xing encoded (VBR) files the information is derived from the Xing tag. If the audio file is showing 0 play time this information is either not there or corrupt. I suspect that the file is not really an MP3 file but uses some other CODEC that does not easily support playback length, most good software (like foobar or winamp) will read the file then decide what CODEC is used to play it, some however will just check the extension and try to pump it through the wrong CODEC and it will not play. If you are familiar with the internal structure of different audio formats you can open it in a hex editor and find out what the actual format is.

For some reason, that reminds me of the virus that was transcoding mp3s to wma.
EDIT: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=64754