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My collection contains some MP3s which have some glitches like

  • displaying the wrong duration on loading
  • minor jumps
  • suddenly ending despite the duration claims another minute remaining
  • noise

I'm looking for a tool that can detect as many of these glitches as possible and fix those that can be fixed (obviously e.g. noise can not simply be eliminated in most cases).

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Those sound like player issues. Are you sure those are caused by your MP3 files? – digitxp Aug 24 '11 at 14:59
@digitxp the sudden ending is probably due to missing parts of the file, but the wrongly displayed time might be caused by VLC. But still that means there is something wrong with the file since other files show the correct time. Noise and jumps might be due to a bad CD read, I digitalized my collection without doing double-checks :-/ – Tobias Kienzler Aug 24 '11 at 15:02
hm, the wrong duration could stem from VBR vs CBR... so the remaining problems are incompleteness and CD reading errors – Tobias Kienzler Aug 24 '11 at 15:17

2 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

The command-line tool mp3val makes quick work of scanning for, and optionally repairing, structural defects in mp3 files. I try to run it over pretty much every file in my collection, on the "can't hurt" principle. It identifies amazing numbers of ostensibly-good files with defects ranging from inconsequential to severe.

mp3val is especially good at recognizing and correcting header deficiencies, such as lack of VBR headers in a VBR file (the source of most wrong-duration and seeking issues). But it will also clear out garbage/corrupted audio frame data, unusable cruft that some players may handle less than elegantly if it's left in the file.

It can even be told to run over an entire directory of mp3's, repairing only those files it finds problems with, keeping backups (or optionally not), preserving timestamps (optionally), and logging the session to a text file (optionally).

And it's free and open source! (The link is to its sourceforge project.)

EDIT: One last thing I forgot to mention. "But mp3val hasn't been updated since 2009!!", I hear you cry. That's very true! It's been working just fine since 2009, and hasn't needed an update. (After all, it's not like the MP3 file format has changed any in the past 2 years!)

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also +1 a second time for you edit :-) though there seem to be some valid bugs still open... – Tobias Kienzler Aug 26 '11 at 15:04
1  
Yeah, it seems mp3val has some real problems under Windows 7 with some esoteric filenames. That's unfortunate. (First rule of modern computing: any sufficiently large MP3 collection will contain a file with any given form of esoteric filename.) It could use some luv from a Windows programmer, if anyone's up to it! [OffTopic: It was surreal looking into the mp3val svn and finding out that the most recent patch had come from ME — especially since I'd totally forgotten about doing it! ;-)] – FeRD Dec 20 '11 at 20:40
up vote 6 down vote

I assumed you already tried the first option on google ...? Also a perl script, mp3checker, that might be useful.

Edit:

As for repairing your tracks might give MP3 Diags(links to a lifehacker article) a look.

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thanks, checkmate is a nice tool to identify problem files (that still leaves the task of fixing things if possible though) – Tobias Kienzler Aug 24 '11 at 15:14
Thumbs up for MP3 Diags. I had problems with my mp3 player not reporting the duration correctly. MP3 Diags found and fixed the problem. – David L Jan 23 at 4:54

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