Missing about 1 second of the beginning of imported mp3

[Roddy]

Using Audacity 1.33, 1.34 and even in earlier versions, there are some audio files (not) that once I just import them into Audacity, are missing about 1 second or less of the beginning of the song. I haven't even begun to edit, just the initial import of the sound file. The files are not copy protected, no DRM license, or anything like that.

For example, I imported an mp3 file into Audacity. The file appears, the waveform appears, but it's missing the first few milliseconds to almost 1 second of the beginning of the song, therefore, when you press play, you can tell that there is a bit of audio missing. It doesn't do it with all files, just some, and they do not seem to have anything in common with one another.

[steve]

Could you upload a small example of one of these problem files and post a link so that we can see if we can reproduce the problem.

[Roddy]

Thanks for your response. I will upload the first 5-10 seconds of the song since the problem is only the beginning being cut. When I open it in Windows Media Player, iTunes, or Real Player, you can here the into just fine, but when it's imported into Audacity, it cuts a few milliseconds from the beginning. Let me know of your findings, and thank you.

In God's Harmony,
RODDY

P.S.
In what format must I upload the sound clip for when I tried the "Upload Attachment" tab at the bottom of this window Iget the following message when trying to upload the mp3 file?: "The extension mp3 is not allowed."

[steve]

We need to establish exactly what the fault is before we can diagnose the cause.

just import them into Audacity, are missing about 1 second or less of the beginning of the song.

but when it's imported into Audacity, it cuts a few milliseconds from the beginning.

There's a big difference between "a few milliseconds" and "about 1 second".
As you will know, mp3 is a "lossy" compression format, and it is not an "exact" copy of the original (uncompressed) audio.
When a WAV file is encoded as an mp3, about 25 milliseconds of silence are added to the beginning of the file. This is not due to a fault in a particular encoder, it is just the way that mp3 files are - they always start with a short period of silence (and this is why you can't make "seamless" loops from mp3's).

Another thing to consider is that just because a file has an "mp3" extension (it is called "something.mp3"), that does not mean that it is actually an mp3 file. Any file can be named with an mp3 extension, and if it is an audio file, it may still play in (some) media players.

In what format must I upload the sound clip

You cannot upload audio clips to this forum (it requires too much space / bandwidth on the server to allow everyone to uplaod audio here), so you would need to use a file hosting service such as http://myfreefilehosting.com and then post a link here. There are plenty of other free file hosting services if you look on Google.

What I am interested in is to see if there is anything peculiar about your mp3 file that can account for this problem. To do this I would need to see one of your mp3's that has this problem.

We could test it the other way round if you prefer: download this mp3 http://easyspacepro.com/audacity/short-bleep.mp3 and open it in Audacity. It should look like the screenshot below. If it does, then Audacity is working correctly and if it doesn't, then there is a problem.

screenshot.gif (17.62 KiB) Viewed 2301 times

[Roddy]

Steve,

I sent you a private message with a link to the entire sound file, along with explanantions.

In God's Harmony,
RODDY

[steve]

Hi Roddy,

I've had a look at that file and there is one thing that I've found that is a bit strange: the file header information says that the file is 2 minutes 56 seconds duration, when it is actually 2 min 56.9 seconds long (almost a second longer than it says it is). The file was encoded with a very old (2001) version of Lame, so perhaps this is due to a bug in that version of LAME, and Audacity is loosing nearly a second of audio, because it is expecting the file to be shorter than it really is.

I've just tried decoding it with LameDrop, then importing the WAV file into Audacity, and that fixes it.

[Roddy]

Steve,
I want to thank you for your taking the time to look into this. As I stated in my private message to you, I used VLC media player, which also transcodes files to shorten the original file. After inputing the file and selecting to only save the first 10 seconds, I then tried inputing it into Audacity to make sure it would play. And all of a sudden, I noticed that it now had a few milliseconds of silence at the beginning of the song, and no missing song parts.

This definitely makes more sense now after you tried the same with a different transcoder. Not sure what kind of bug Lame might have encoded into it, but I'm glad this is fixed. Hopefully, if anyone else has or might encounter a similar problem, they'll know what to do. Once again, thanks for everything!

In God's Harmony,
RODDY