Audio file strangeness

Gary James wrote on 3/6/2013, 1:33 PM

I'm finishing up adding a new feature to Timeline Tools that lets me open a .M3U or .WPL audio Playlist file and import all the listed audio files into a new Vegas audio track.

Everything was working fine until I opened up a .WPL playlist file that referenced an .MP3 I had ripped off a CD. When I try to add the .MP3 to the Vegas Media Pool, the resulting Media object is bad. All the other files ripped from the CD work fine and get added to the Media Pool without a problem. As a sanity check on my code I tried dragging the questionable .MP3 file into the Vegas timeline from Windows Explorer. But the cursor never changes style indicating the file is droppable. And when I release the Mouse button Vegas shows a warning message saying "None of the files dropped on Vegas can be opened".

Ok, I figured the .MP3 file must be corrupted. So I double click on the file from Windows Explorer. Windows Media player opens up and without a hiccup starts playing the song. Hmmm. I close Media Player then double click on the Playlist in question. Media Player opens up and starts playing the first song in the playlist. I press Stop, select the problematic song and press Play. Sure enough the song starts playing without a problem.

Has anyone ever seen this before? An .MP3 file that will not open in Vegas, but works fine in Media Player and even the old Media Player Classic?

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 3/6/2013, 1:57 PM

So often, things like this are caused by metadata character encoding that the player may or may not understand. Vegas, in the past, has been pretty picky about .mp3 files with diverse character encoding. Open the questionable file in a tag editor and retype the metadata, try again in Vegas.

Gary James wrote on 3/6/2013, 2:38 PM

I looked at the file in a program called MP3TAG. Everything looks fine, all the tag info is there and looks to be correct. I even had it re-save the tag info but the file still doesn't load into Vegas. I tried, and it also fails to load into Sound Forge v10.

musicvid10 wrote on 3/6/2013, 2:41 PM

Can you upload the file somewhere? I had success with some balky MP3s in Sound Forge a while back.

Gary James wrote on 3/6/2013, 3:21 PM

Here's the link to the Dropbox MP3 File location:

ChristoC wrote on 3/6/2013, 3:41 PM

Indeed it seems to have some feral problem, however I used another app to re-rewrite it, and now seems to open ok in SCS apps.
New filename is "Incubus - Megalomaniac Edited_rep.mp3"
Download (for 14 days) at https://www.yousendit.com/download/UVJnUGhYcVhmVGJvS3NUQw

musicvid10 wrote on 3/6/2013, 4:11 PM

Well, it's not the tags. I removed them all, and it still doesn't open.

Gary James wrote on 3/6/2013, 4:37 PM

ChristoC. Thanks. But I've already found a similar work-around. I used Format Factory to copy the .MP3 to a WMA file; then I used MP3TAG to copy the .MP3 tags to the WMA file. Now the WMA can be opened up in Vegas. I'm just curious as to why this particular .MP3 behaves so strangely.

I have to admit, this problem comes as a mixed blessing. Now that I've got an example of an "incompatible" MP3 file, I've accommodated this possibility in the Playlist Import feature that I'm adding to Timeline Tools. I never would have expected something like this.

MarkWWW wrote on 3/7/2013, 12:37 PM

Despite being labelled as an MP3 file (i.e. MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3), if you have a look at it with something like MediaInfo you will see that this is actually a Layer 2 file, not a Layer 3 file.

Virtually all other MP3 audio replay codecs in the world will handle Layer 2 and Layer 1 files as well as Layer 3, but the one in Vegas is fussy and seems only willing to deal with genuine Layer 3 files.

Mark

Gary James wrote on 3/7/2013, 4:19 PM

Great information Mark. I should add that this probably isn't a Vegas CODEC issue so much as it's a Sony issue. I say this because the .MP3 in question also fails to open up in Sony Sound Forge 10.

musicvid10 wrote on 3/7/2013, 7:20 PM

Great catch, Mark!
I looked at it in MediaInfo and never even noticed . . .

MarkWWW wrote on 3/8/2013, 8:33 AM

Yes, I expect all the Sony software uses the same dll for this so you would get the same problem with all of the Sony progs.

It's puzzling why it's so fussy about this though as there's no technical problem with decoding Layers 1 and 2 if you are able to handle Layer 3. As I understand it Layer 1 and 2 need the same toolkit as Layer 3, they just don't use all the tools.

Mark