some mp3's don't play on external player
 

Using k3b his Ubuntu machine (8.04 I think), a friend burned several (about 50) mp3's to a CD-R, and tried to play it in an external mp3-capable player. Only seven of the songs played. I copied the files from the CD-R to a Slackware 12.2 machine and burned a new CD-R with k3b. Same results (the same seven songs, and only those, played). When the player tried to play the "bad" songs. there would be a few seconds of silence, then the player would move to the next. All of the songs could be played from hard drive or CD-R using Rhythmbox on the Ubuntu machine and xmms and Amarok on the Slackware machine.

I then re-encoded two test songs, one "bad" and one "good", by piping the output of mpg321 to lame with different settings, and burned my new versions as well as the two originals to a fresh CD-R. Everything played except for the original "bad" mp3.

Since my re-encoded mp3's played, I'm assuming something got messed up on the original mp3's.

Is there any way to analyze an mp3 for "correctness" and/or find how it was originally encoded?

Right now I'm looking at burning several hundred mp3's, making a note of which ones don't play, re-encoding them, and burning them again; or just re-encoding everything. Neither seems like an efficient use of time.

One additional piece of information: My friend claims that the same mp3's have been burned to a CD-R using a Windows program (he didn't know which one) and they all played fine on an external player. I couldn't verify this, though.

hello,
i have found two issues with my mp3 player (which is about three years old).
1. it does not support idv2 tags
2. it does not support vbr enabled mp3s.

i fixed a bunch using easytag -> http://easytag.sourceforge.net/
else i need to re-encode.

For my field recorder, it does not playback file types that it does not record. Since it's a stereo field recorder, it does not playback mono mp3s. And it doesn't playback stereo mp3s all that well, so I generally just use the source wav files. But you might check your mp3 specs to see if they're mono or stereo, and what other extras like bitrate. If it's an old or limited mp3 player it might only support certain formats. There's obviously some difference between those 7 and the others. My cars CD player doesn't like tracks / mp3s longer than 3 minutes. When it encounters one, it's generally the last track it will play until you eject and re-insert the disc.

HTH

It's definitely a tag problem. Still don't know what. though.

I used EasyTAG (thanks for pointing that out) to strip all the old tags off and put in new ones. Whe I burned the new files, they all played (except for one).

Maybe someday, when I'm really bored, I'll try to figure out what the problem is/was; but, for now, I'm satisfied.