Song time is 0:00

[kiepie]

Have songs on my pc, it plays 100% and show as a healthy 5 mb but in every player (VLC, WMP, winamp) it shows the time as 0:00.

What could be wrong?

 

[BiteMe]

if the songs are variable bit rate mp3's then some music players have problems figuring out the total time (i.e. size in mb divided by bitrate=song length) because the bitrate changes, hence the variable par tin the name.

when they oops out, it can either be with time counting down, or time staying at zero etc.

it shouldnt happen with vlc or wmp, but older version (low numbered v2's) of winamp can have this problem.
why you still have it with all of these prograns is a mystery, sorry, cant help

 

[kiepie]

if the songs are variable bit rate mp3's then some music players have problems figuring out the total time (i.e. size in mb divided by bitrate=song length) because the bitrate changes, hence the variable par tin the name.

when they oops out, it can either be with time counting down, or time staying at zero etc.

it shouldnt happen with vlc or wmp, but older version (low numbered v2's) of winamp can have this problem.
why you still have it with all of these prograns is a mystery, sorry, cant help

Thanks for sheding some light though.

Can it be fixed?

 

[Gnome]

Thanks for sheding some light though.

Can it be fixed?

That should not be a issue with Winamp, all my songs are VBR MP3's with no playback, seeking or track length issues.

What kind of format is it? WMA for example has a plethora of flags that can prohibit just about anything from file seeking to copying the file, and other flags that might cause issues (such as the streaming flag, that might be enabled even thought the file is not streamed causing it to be reported with no length)

The file might be damaged as well, although it plays just fine the header could be damaged which could cause incorrect information to be reported with certain formats.

If you can't live without the ability to see track length (and I presume that seeking is also missing?), you're easiest solution is to re-encode the track with some quality loss, which you might or might not notice, but mathematically there will be quality loss, unless you encode it to a lossless format like wav, flac,etc.

 

[Conspirator]

Investigate "Xing headers". The trick is to calculate the bitrate of the first block as if its not VBR. Most progs just check the first block and then work out the length from there. If the first splitseconds of the song is silence then the bitrate for that is low. Therefore the total time is calculated incorrectly.