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Topic: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players (Read 12283 times) previous topic - next topic
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Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

I love Foobar but it's also been driving me a bit crazy lately. I'd appreciate any ideas on how to troubleshoot a Foobar playback issue.

I have a large directory of music, (flac /mp3). All of which have played fine in Foobar in the past. However every week a few random music files will suddenly refuse to play in Foobar, failing with the unhelpful Foobar failure message

"Playback error
Unable to open item for playback (Unsupported format or corrupted file):
[file path]"

The error message doesn't give any clues as to the failure reason. I have checksums for all of these files and not a single bit in the files is corrupt or has changed in any way. Nothing is obviously amiss with the files which continue to play flawlessly on other players e.g. Poweramp, VLC, Audition, et al.

Reinstalling Foobar doesn't resolve the issue
Using latest Foobar2000 v.1.3.14
No updates available.
No third party components (default install)

Dell XPS 9350
Windows 10.0.10586 (64 bit)
Realtek audio driver 6.4.10041.127

Any ideas?









Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #1 –
Preferences / Advanced / Debug
Enable "crash on playback error"
Fire crash reports and post back here that you've sent them, I'll match crash report tracker entries against your forum info and be able to see what exactly happened.
Microsoft Windows: We can't script here, this is bat country.

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Peter on
Preferences / Advanced / Debug
Enable "crash on playback error"
Fire crash reports and post back here that you've sent them, I'll match crash report tracker entries against your forum info and be able to see what exactly happened.

Crash report sent. If you need anything else or would like the crash reports emailed, let me know. Thanks

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #3 –
Got the reports, thanks. I'm looking into this.
Microsoft Windows: We can't script here, this is bat country.

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #4 –
Did you try to verify the integrity of the files?

(right-click>utilities>verify integrity)

If you have errors you can try rebuilding stream/fixing headers.

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #5 –
Thank you for posting this problem. I thought I was going crazy. I tried googling problems similar to mine every way I could think of with no joy.

My problem is a little different from yours. Like you, I have a large library (approx. 120,000 files) and in the last 3 months or so, whole folders of mp3 files have become unusable in foobar2000. By that I mean that ALL of the music files in that particular folder will play distorted at a very low volume.

What's crazy about this is that the music files in question play just fine in other music applications like SMplayer or Nightingale.

I have tried converting the files to wav and back to mp3, to flac and back to mp3. No luck. I've tried using Utilities to rebuild the mp3 stream. No luck. I've tried moving the files to a backup drive and back again. No luck. I've tried removing Foobar2000 and reinstalling it. No luck.

One possible clue: from time to time, I get viruses on my computer. Sometimes, the viruses won't allow me to shut down the computer and I'm forced to power down manually. (After which I start Windows in safe mode and run various antivirus software to clean out the viruses.) At times, I have been unable to shut down Foobar2000 before shutting down my computer. It may be that somehow the files in these particular folders have somehow been affected so that they don't play correctly in Foobar2000 (although they play perfectly well in other music applications).

Does anyone have any idea why these mp3 files are playing improperly ONLY in Foobar2000 and how to fix them? Is there some information that I could add that would help diagnose the problem?

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #6 –
It occurred to me that a picture of file data from one of the improperly playing files might be helpful:



http://imgur.com/a/bkbbD

A little more information:

Windows 7
Foobar2000 v1.3.7
Components:
Album List
CD Audio Decoder
Converter
Default User Interface
Equalizer
File Operations
Fubar2000 Core
Online Tagger
Playback Statistics
ReplayGain Scanner
Standard DSP Array
Standard Input Array
UPnP/DLA Renderer, Server, Control Point
ZIP/GZIP/RAR Reader

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #7 –
Quote from: mjm716 on
Did you try to verify the integrity of the files?
(right-click>utilities>verify integrity)
If you have errors you can try rebuilding stream/fixing headers.

      "Fix VBR MP3 header"
      "Rebuild MP3 stream"
Thanks for the suggestion but the options there don't apply to my files, which are local & CBR (not VBR).
The very simple integrity check I did was to see if the files were corrupt (CRC32) and confirmed that they play fine in half a dozen other players.



Quote from: oldpompous on
Thank you for posting this problem. I thought I was going crazy.

I have no idea what the issue is as I haven't discerned a pattern. Viruses and malware are not an issue here and I was able to reproduce the issue on a second PC. In any event, Peter is in a better position to look into this when he can find the time. At a guess the files have some unusual metadata that Foobar can't parse. Or possibly some minor bug is afoot.

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #8 –
oldpompous, your issue sounds like something else. Perhaps you could share one of the problematic files.

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #9 –
oldpompous: In
Preferences -> Playback -> Output, what devices and drives do you see? Does it help to change?
I have had an issue like yours, by using wrong drivers. It manifested on fb2k only, because nothing else would enable me to choose the wrong thing. (But I deliberately tried to manually fix something.)

Corrupt audio tracks

Reply #10 –
It turned out that there was no problem with Foobar whatsoever. The issue was that I had some audio files with corruption midway or towards the end of the track. Foobar refused to play these files, correctly saying that they were corrupt.

The confusion came from other players that I tried appearing to play the files properly. But the tracks only played partway through with other players. Other players halted too when they reached the corrupt part of the track.

I'd like to thank Peter for looking into this promptly - much appreciated. Foobar is a great player and solid support just adds to that. If a moderator wishes to edit the original post subject to something more accurate, go ahead as I can't find a way to edit the subject myself.

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #11 –
For reference-

These files can be made playable using "rebuild MP3 stream" context menu command; it will scan the entire file and recover usable parts of the MP3 stream throwing away anything that is not MP3 data or tags.

Normally such files are more or less playable in foobar2000 without manual fixing, but apparent null bytes in these files exceed foobar2000's search-for-MP3-data threshold and we give up searching for content to play.
Microsoft Windows: We can't script here, this is bat country.

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Porcus on
oldpompous: In
Preferences -> Playback -> Output, what devices and drives do you see? Does it help to change?
I have had an issue like yours, by using wrong drivers. It manifested on fb2k only, because nothing else would enable me to choose the wrong thing. (But I deliberately tried to manually fix something.)

I am using a USB DAC for all my applications that play music (audition, audacity, SMplayer, Nightingale, Foobar2000) and only Foobar2000 has a problem playing the mp3 files that I mentioned correctly.

Quote from: Case on
oldpompous, your issue sounds like something else. Perhaps you could share one of the problematic files.

Indeed, Case. I would love to share one of these files with the board, but I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't know how. Help? If you like, I'd be happy to email you and attach one of the files.

Thanks Case and Porcus for getting back to me. Sorry it's taken me so long to reply. For some reason, I wasn't notified of your responses or maybe the notifications ended up in my email spam. :)

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #13 –
I finally figured out what the problem was. The explanation is going to be somewhat convoluted, so those who are not interested can stop reading now.  :-[

A while back, my 20 year old stereo receiver died and I had to replace it. My new receiver needed to be set up using a TV with HDMI inputs, which I don't have, so I rented such a TV. After I returned the TV, I noticed that my left speaker had ceased to work, so when I played a track recorded in stereo, I only was getting half of the signal. As a workaround, on Foobar2000's preferences-->Playback-->DSP Manager, I utilized the Downmix Channels To Mono DSP, which worked well enough.

Now, finally, we get to why my files weren't playing properly. These particular mp3 files were sourced from one of those old educational film reels that used to be shown to children in the 4th grade, so they are of very low quality, under 192 bitrate. When the Downmix Channels To Mono DSP was applied to these mp3s, they broke under the strain.

So, I removed the Downmix Channels To Mono DSP and magically, the mp3 files now play perfectly on Foobar2000. In other words, I caused the problem myself. Duh.  :'(

Re: Foobar won't play mp3/flac files that work fine in other players

Reply #14 –
Interesting. I'm glad you sorted it out. But the quality of the mp3's should have nothing to do with downmixing to mono. Unless those particular files exposed a bug in the plugin.
That's so plausible, I can't believe it.