Unable to play certain MP3's

[Parm]

Licensing?

[directhex]

DRM, shiny advanced technology to ban you from access to your data.

[Parm]

Hmmm, not that I know of.

[phunkygal]

heard of this problem before.. id suggest going back to wmp 9 if you love it that much. sounds like they werent encoded properly. the only solution i ever heard was that they were converted at too high a frequency. just a possibility but have you ever used i tunes? when i installed it once it started randomly converting all my files and gave them all no name. thus i have a gig of music i am slowly sorting through and trying to work out who it is! quite annoying.

[flytrap]

i too reinstalled windows and found that i get the same message when i tried to play most of my thousands of mp3s:

("Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file")

however changing the filename to wav doesn't help, and neither does using winamp.

even more strangely, of those that still will play, maybe half now play different songs, despite the filenames and locations not changing.

i can see no pattern in which files are in which conditions with many albums/folders containing working files, mis-playing files and non-playing files.

my mp3's live on a different hard drive from windows and everything else, really. so if there is a problem with this drive it doesn't seam to effect anything else.

after noticing that some didn't play but before noticing that some songs had changed, i restarted and windows went thru that whole blue-screen disc recovery thing.

its all very odd and annoying. most of my mp3s are backed elsewhere so its not too tragic, but before i put them back onto my hard drive and spend hours trying to shuffle them into a good structure, I'd like to know why this happened, so i can avoid a repeat.

any ideas?

thanks a lot.
d.

[autopilot]

One word; Foobar2000.

If that wont play them, almost nothing will (apart from maybe VLC).

Most likely is that Nero (or whatever you ripped with) used some kind of proprietary MP3 codec, rather than LAME etc. If the above wont work, the only way would be to try and figure out exactly what codec was used.

If they played once, an obscure MP3 codec (which you/some software might have installed yourself and cant remember/did not know about) is the only realistic answer. That is unless somehow they have all become corrupt, which would be odd for so many files (maybe even an MP3 killing virus. It has been known, but very unlikely i would have thought). Possibly a DRM issue, but again fairly unlikely with MP3.

In future make sure you use a good ripper, such as EAC (the best) or CDex and the LAME codec. If someone has to rip to MP3, always use the lastest version of LAME. When i say 'has' to rip to MP3, i mean that you really have to have a good reason, like the portable player you have, because there are much better options than ye old e MP3.

If none of the helps and cant find a solution here, a visit to the god-like MP3 knowledge base that is www.hydrogenaudio.org and their forums. If someone there can't help you, know one can.

EDIT: fixed bad link.

[just_laze]

Exact Audio Copy, Lame3.X.

Take it as a lesson learnt.

[flytrap]

Well....
I (the one with some mp3s that "play each other" and others which don’t play at all) did use eac and lame.
They all played fine before I reinstalled windows.
I have a horrible feeling that the disc corrupted, or something (but what do I know) I which case I’m hesitant to spend hours replacing them all in case it happens again.
I don’t know if the ones which play the wrong thing are maybe the misguided result of windows disc recovery.
....or might it be a virus? - I have avg plodding away in the background and have not had too much trouble with viruses in the past.
Anyway, I’ll have a look on www.hydrogenaudio.com but if anyone has a clue what’s going on or what I should do, I’d be very grateful to hear.

[flytrap]

www.hydrogenaudio.com just appears to be a load of adverts.
am i missing something?

[autopilot]

Sorrt, it's www.hydrogenaudio.org

They have a great WiKi too.

[autopilot]

oops, double post.

[SourceQuench]

Exact Audio Copy, Lame3.X.

Take it as a lesson learnt.

Either that or FLAC it in the same way and then convert to your chosen player's preferred format (don't need to re-rip to new formats every time you change your portable player...)