Can't play more than 8 seconds of any song

[Quote] #1

29 Mar 2008 08:52 pm

leQ

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Joined: 29 Mar 2008
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hi...

i’m having a stinker of a preoblem here. can’t play more than 8 seconds of any song - i have thousands - and they play alright on my mp3 player), using windows meida player, itunes, zinf (my favorite), and VLC player (a nice video player i used to watch the ark with). all my players konk out after 8 seconds. and it’s 8 seconds into the song of every song i play from that particular directory. what gives here? could i have an issue with some sort of DRM attached to the file (i don’t see how that can be as they’re all recordings i’ve made. so i thought i’d toss it out into never ever land and see what comes back.

and thanks.

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[Quote] #2

30 Mar 2008 06:15 am

anonymous

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Joined: 20 Nov 2004
Posts: 1,239

This is a wild guess, but this resembles the kind of damage some of the old worms used to do (I think Melissa or I love you virus). They would destroy all the mp3’s on a person’s hard drive. Again, this is only a guess. Only this time instead of overwriting the mp3 header (rendering it unreadable at all), it overwrites past a certain offset? (which corresponds roughly to 8 seconds)
Normally when I can’t play an mp3, I try with various players (Real, QuickTime, WMP, WinAmp), because some players can’t read certain type of headers (ID3 tags) but others can. It’s weird because you’re getting audio at all, so I don’t think this is it.

The bottom line is you want to find out if it’s your system, or if it’s the files (I think it’s the files). The fast way to check is to send the mp3 to someone else and have them try to play it on various players on their PC. If they can’t play it, the file is damaged; if they can, then it’s something with your PC (though I wouldn’t be able to guess what based on the information above).

Can't play more than 8 seconds of any song

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