Time is oddly wrong in my exported file

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hello,

I’m having a weird issue I have never had before now, and I cannot figure out how to fix it. I’m working with a long mp3 (nearly an hour; it’s the audio recorded from the first act of a live musical), I’ve gone through and touched things up, now I’m trying to export it (again as mp3) so I can use it in my video software to replace the original video’s audio. The problem is when I export the mp3, the time is off. I’ll explain via example since I don’t know the right terms to use. If I start the track in any media player (even in my video software) from the beginning and let it play through, everything works as expected. However, if I skip ahead in the track a bit, say 30 seconds in, the audio that plays is actually restarting from the beginning. So the time then obviously runs out before the entire mp3 has played. Why in the world is this happening?

Thank you for your help!

2

Try making a WAV file.

I’ve seen the timing fouled-up in a VBR MP3, but I haven’t seen that for a long time. Plus, MP3 is lossy compression and it will get re-compressed when you render to whatever audio/video format you’re using. So, use WAV and if you want a compressed format, compress once to your final format.

…There is a tool called VbrFix and another called MP3Diags that can fix some of these timing problems, but it shouldn’t be happening with the current version of LAME. Or, you could use CBR (if you want MP3).

3

Hi, thanks for replying!

I’ve tried making a WAV and it didn’t resolve the issue. The exact same problem results. :frowning:

4

WAV files are pretty foolproof… I can’t believe the WAV file messes-up in Windows Media Player…

I can believe there’s something strange with your video editor… Most likely it’s related to the video format. I’ve had audio/video sync problems after editing MPEG-2 files (even without exporting & editing the audio separately) and the more-compressed formats seem to cause even more trouble. If you’re using MPEG-4 or MOV or any of those highly-compressed formats it might help to make a temporary file in a less-compressed format, or maybe just re-render a “new clean” file in the same format before editing. That violates the rule of multiple lossy compressions, but sometimes I’ve had to do it.