mp3s play slowly and noisily then stop

Any mp3 I open with Audacity 3.2.3 on my Mac Monterey 12.6.2 plays too slowly, with lots of buzzing, then within a second or two stops. It is possible that it is looping a miniscule portion of the file; it’s hard to tell.

These mp3s (commerically made, like from Amazon, or homemade, from ripped CDs or even old recordings from cassette deck) play fine in Quicktime and Apple Music. Editing with ffmpeg in the Mac terminal works as expected, meaning the files change and are still playable in QT and Music. But no adjustments made elsewhere have corrected playback in Audacity.

Probably the best solution is to convert it to WAV with a 3rd-party utility. (Audacity decompresses the file when you open it anyway.)

I’m a Windows guy so I can’t recommend a conversion application.

There is also a tool called MP3 Diags that can diagnose & repair MP3s, but it runs on Windows or Linux and it’s usually just easier to decompress the file to WAV.

That tool would be Max.

– Bill

I was certain I’d tried that, but lo and behold, mp3 to wav via ffmpeg creates a perfectly usable file.

Thanks @dvddoug and @billw58