My attempts to convince the girlfriend that we should just run long RCA cables from the computers to our Bose and play all our music from our computers fell on deaf ears (she doesn’t like cables lying about on the floors and had a conniption when I suggested punching holes in the wall and running the cables behind the wall). So I got her an iPod for her birthday.
Now, I’ve been converting all my CDs to MP3 files for at least six years, and therefore have essentially my entire music collection ready to go, ready to upload to yonder iPod, so we’d only have to digitize her CDs and we’re up and running. Problem is, I did the first 2/3rds of them with Proteron’s N2MP3, which had a very highly regarded variable bitrate (VBR) algorithm — set it for 32 bits minimum and finest quality and you end up with MP3 files of quality as good as 396 bps but filesize akin to 96 bps. Then, at some point along the evolution of MacOS X, Proteron quit updating the product and I switched to using Audion to encode my CDs, again using the VBR algorithm. If this does not as of yet sound like a problem:
These VBR files, when opened in many players (including iTunes), confuses them about the duration of the track. My guess is that the players snag the first bitrate in the file and then take that plus the file length and perform simple math, but with VBR a single file can start off at 48 bps, go to 426 a second later, go to 160 the next second, and so on. So I open an MP3 player and open a file, “TrackOne.mp3”, which is actually of duration 5:03 and the player displays the track as being 47:21 instead. And it plays until it reaches the end of the song (with the progress bar just barely off the lefthand edge) and then it stops, no problem. So I open a second file, “TrackTwo.mp3”, which is of duration 6:10 and the player says the track is 3:34, and this time it plays and the progress bar scoots along and bumps into the end-of-song right-hand edge, and what happens then depends on what sw I’m using to play it back. Audion has no problem continuing to play the fourth minute of a supposedly 3-minute song, and neither does SoundApp (my old MacOS 9 player) but iTunes, which defaults to “Crossfade”, starts fading out the song around 3:32 or 3:33 and bringing in the next song of the playlist. And so does the iPod.
In iTunes, after much cursing and investigation of menus, I found the “Crossfade” option and unchecked it, and with that setting disabled, iTunes seems to play my music OK. The iPod, on the other hand, does not appear to have any such setting, and iTunes, which is Apple’s officially approved mechanism for setting up your iPod, doesn’t seem to have one for disabling “Crossfade” on the iPod either.
Incidentally, I also discovered to my surprise that Audion would let me create playlists on the iPod and upload music to the iPod. (Way cool! I don’t use iTunes otherwise and would prefer to use Audion for everything.) Unfortunately, VBR files uploaded to the iPod via Audion don’t fare any better than the ones uploaded via iTunes.
OK, finally, the questions:
•Who else has had similar experience with VBR files encoded (esp. with sw other than iTunes, assuming iTunes does indeed do VBR at all?) that they had on hand before getting an iPod? What did you do?
• Is the “duration” of an MP3 file saved in a header somewhere that could be edited, so that iPod sees it as being longer than it currently sees it? Where and how would I edit it?
• Is there something I overlooked that would let me turn off “Crossfading” on the iPod?
I really don’t want to go back and re-encode 250-300 CDs, dammit!