Missing beginning of MP3 files

[RickGates]

Greetings,

Running 1.2.6 on Vista...

When I open several (but not all) MP3 files, Audacity trims about a quarter to a half second of the front. In other words, if a spoken MP3 file starts with "The rain in Spain", Audacity will cut "The" and I only hear "rain in Spain". I've clicked "Skip to Start" so I know I'm at the absolute beginning of the file.

I get the exact same problem with the same files on my other Vista machine.

Anybody run into this before?

Confused,

Rick

[kozikowski]

Do you get the exact same problem with any other files?

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

Pull down piano2.wav and either of the two mp3 versions. They all match. Do they work?

Koz

[RickGates]

Thanks for the link Koz... they all matched up just fine, so I kept digging further.

I discovered that if I make a copy of the mp3 file, that the copy still gets the beginning trimmed when opening in Audacity. Still no luck.

However, I discovered that if I remove all ID3 tags from the mp3 file...

From Windows Explorer
right click
choose "Properties"
choose "Details" tab
choose "Remove Properties And Personal Information"
select all the properties and remove them

...that when I then open this file in Audacity, there is no trimming!

Check out this image of the first 2 seconds of two mp3 files:



The problem mp3 is at the top. You can see that it begins at a point roughly .7 seconds into the good mp3 at the bottom.

Weird, 'eh?

Thanks for everything,

Rick

[kozikowski]

But not that weird. Early versions of Audacity had problems with some characters inside IDE tags. Time to upgrade to 1.3. See if you can find Windows 1.3.7. The latest and greatest is 1.3.9 and there are occasional problems with that.

You can safely install both 1.2 and 1.3 as long as you don't try to use both at once.

1.3 projects will not open in 1.2.

Koz

[RickGates]

1.3.9 for Vista seems to have done the job Koz.

Thanks for all your help,

Rick