New Wave Outpost Forum

Mike - I noticed that your recent Songs Of The Week have been encoded using a variable bit rate codec. They sound great, but they drive my WinAmp crazy. They play ok, but WinAmp can't figure out how long the songs are. It will say a 4 minute song is like 20 minutes long. The problem is that when it finishes playing the song, WinAmp annoyingly waits for the 20 minutes to pass before switching to the next song in my play list. Any suggestions?

Fritz,

My WinAmp freaks out too and I'm typically pretty meticulous (read: anal) when it comes to track length accuracy, but I've decided that the huge benefit of using VBR over CBR MP3's is worth a little inconvenience for the time being (192kbps is very good, but I still hear occasional artifacts--rarely, mind you). I don't have the 20 minute wait problem -- that would drive me crazy! I'm using the older WinAmp 2.81, since I found WinAmp 3.0 to be buggy. (They apparently rewrote the app from the ground up, which might explain the problems.)

One big annoyance with WinAmp 3.0 is that you can hardly seek through a song using the slider--it usually snaps back to the beginning. Version 2 at least allows seeking, even though I've noticed that the progress slider tends to stop and double back on itself occasionally, when the bitrate changes in a certain manner. Also, they dumped the total playlist time and time remaining features (I think) with version 3.0. Of course, a playlist full of VBR MP3's is hopelessly inaccurate in version 2.

I believe MP3 players should be capable of reading accurate VBR track lengths, but I'm not sure if they actually have to scan the entire file first or whether the info gets stored somewhere in the header.

WinAmp's still my favorite, but the new version has me wondering if I need to find a new player.

Anybody know of any MP3 players that read VBR MP3 track lengths accurately? <img src=icon_smile_sad.gif border=0 align=middle>

I found a solution. Download this MP3 tag utility:

http://www.magnusbrading.com/mp3ts/

It contains a feature to fix & repair VBR headers so they report accurate track lengths in players, including WinAmp. For some reason, when I encode my VBR's using the LAME encoder, it fails to set this information in the header properly. At least now I can fix all of my existing VBRs (thousands at this point) in one shot. Nice utility ... definitely try it out!

Cool...

I'll try it.

That's sweet Mike. Good find!

Ya know, I *USED* to be a Winamp devotee - primarily because it loaded fast and was the easiest to use (and they have that "eject" button which all other mp3 players lack).

BUT

Winamp 2.x and 3.x both seem to crap out on Windows XP. Subtle sometimes but it just doesn't cut it for me anymore. SO I moved to Musicmatch. I know it's a bit of a BIG program - but once you get used to it (and the slightly longer start-up time) you actually learn to love it. It handles just about everything, the encoding it top notch, the skins kick ass and you can include album art - which for me - is the clincher.

My 2 cents.

Is winamp still free nowadays?

iTunes is quite nice and it's free.

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"Photography with a Vision"
http://www.cooganphoto.com

I'm using Winamp 2.8 on XP Pro and it's fine with both CBR and VBR files, plays both without any problems. Apparently the later versions are really slow and buggy which has influenced my reason for not upgrading.

As for encoding, for me it's CBR at 192 using Lame on EAC and they sound great, but then YMMV.


--

"As chairman of the Cradle of Filth fanclub I'm the most insensitive man in Britain, but even I can see there's tension there"