Why are Bloc Pary repeating themselves?

November 14, 2006 1:30 PM

Why the hell is it doing that!! iTunes is destroying my music when I try to edit ID tags. Theres

I noticed recently that when I was adding the album art to the ID tags the length of the track was increasing! I could literaluy see the track time changing before my eyes! So I played the track, the first 20 seconds had be duplicated. i.e. i played for 20 seconds then skipped back to the beggining and played again. Weird! Ive since noticed that this has happened on a number of albums!

Also When im trying to select a whole album to change the genre, it only changes one or two tracks. I have to repeat the process 5-6 times to get it to change the rest of them.

Ive uninstalled iTunes twice and I thought I that had fixed it. But after a short period of normal use the problem comes back.

Ive also noticed that dB Poweramp struggles to change the ID tags too, so the problem may not be limited to iTunes.

In fact I just checked Musicbraiz and that doesn't seem to want to work either. WHATS GOING ON!

So far, this problem has ruined my Bloc Party EP and my Ibrahim Ferer album! This cant go on!

Please help me out here, before I nuke my laptop with a clean windows install....

posted by gergtreble to computers & internet (12 comments total)

What are you encoding them with?
posted by bonaldi at 1:50 PM on November 14, 2006

I have never heard of anything like that before.

Are/were the files encoded using iTunes to begin with? I wonder if they're corrupt, or in some other way nonstandard, and iTunes is choking on them for some reason.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:08 PM on November 14, 2006

They are just normal MP3 files. Most are encoded with LAME, some by itunes itself.

Whats worrying me is that it doesnt seem to be limited to iTunes alone. dBpoweramp and Musicbrainz appear to be choking on them too. It doing it on old files ive never had a problem with and new files Ive just ripped!

Something screwy is going on.
posted by gergtreble at 2:30 PM on November 14, 2006

Ok on deeper investigation...

Its not doing it on all tracks just certain ones. And it only adds the extra intros when I add the album art.

It just seems that edidting the Id tags has "become difficult".

What do you think?

Cut my losses and reinstall windows? Because removing iTunes has had no effect.
posted by gergtreble at 2:41 PM on November 14, 2006

How's your free space on the hard drive? My dad had problems like this when he got down to only around one gb free, and it cleared up when he axed an assload of old crap.
posted by klangklangston at 2:52 PM on November 14, 2006

Well all my music is on an external drive with nearly 200Gb free on it. My main C: drive has over 5 Gb free on it. Although I shall do some cleaning tonight.
posted by gergtreble at 2:55 PM on November 14, 2006

In fact on checking the C: Drive has 10Gb free. So Its not short of space.
posted by gergtreble at 3:04 PM on November 14, 2006

...can't help with what's going on, but you just explained what happened to some of my MP3s eighteen months ago.
posted by Hogshead at 3:35 PM on November 14, 2006

Ah well at least im not alone. Was it the same trigger for you? I.e. when you added album art to the metadata?
posted by gergtreble at 3:54 PM on November 14, 2006

I'm not sure of the exact trigger. I'd downloaded a gizmo that automatically went through every album in iTunes and added album art grabbed from Amazon. The timescale is fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure it was shortly after that I noticed that a number of MP3s had the first third prefixed to the start of the track. That's all I can tell you.
posted by Hogshead at 6:57 PM on November 14, 2006

Weird...

Oh well, i guess its time to do my bi-annual windows reinstall then. Ive got FAR too much crap on this thing anyway....
posted by gergtreble at 7:40 PM on November 14, 2006

I use foobar 2000 to fix my mp3 headers when I get issues like this.

You'll have to poke around thru the menu for the right command, I can't recall it at the moment.
posted by bashos_frog at 7:41 AM on December 17, 2006