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Topic: Click/pop noise at start of MP3, but not on Rockbox (MP3 player) or VLC (Read 3455 times) previous topic - next topic
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Click/pop noise at start of MP3, but not on Rockbox (MP3 player) or VLC

Hi everyone and a happy new year!

Yesterday I discovered something strange. While playing back in foobar2000 (Windows 7 home, 64 bit) some MP3 files had an click/pop noise at the beginning. (It also occurs on two other Windows 7 machines, one of them not touched since July 2018.)

So I listened on my MP3 player with Rockbox: no noise. If I connect the MP3 player to the computer and play it, the noise is there. In VLC it is not there, but in different Media Player versions, my studio software or FFmpeg.

I cutted the attached mp3 snipped with mp3DirectCut and the behaviour stays. The software Mp3diags has nothing to complain except that there is no tag inside.

I printed four Wav files, how Cubase 6, Audition 1.5, iZotope RX 5 and FFmpeg put this sound inside (in Foobar it sounds like the Audition and iZotope plop). They differ from software to software, but stay exactly the same if I reopen it in the same program. FFmpeg from 2014 and 2018 (version 4) decoded both exactly the same.

Has anyone a clue what is wrong with the playback?

Kind regards
Gojko

Re: Click/pop noise at start of MP3, but not on Rockbox (MP3 player) or VLC

Reply #1 –
Mp3GuessEnc reports that "Frame 6 may be corrupted." The first drum hit is lost even in decoders that conceal the error well (mpglib, mad, reaper). If you have multiple files with this kind of corruption at the start, maybe the cause is a buggy tag editing software.

Re: Click/pop noise at start of MP3, but not on Rockbox (MP3 player) or VLC

Reply #2 –
This mp3 file contains a string "LAME3.98.3". There was a bug in LAME 3.98.3 that was fixed in 3.98.4: https://sourceforge.net/p/lame/bugs/367/
 

Re: Click/pop noise at start of MP3, but not on Rockbox (MP3 player) or VLC

Reply #3 –
Thanks, Lvqcl, for the information. What a pity, that there was such a bug in Lame!
And J7n, you are right: Even in VLC and on my MP3 player, where I hear no noise, the first drum hit isn’t completely there. All the following hits have sharper transients.
Best regards!
Gojko

Re: Click/pop noise at start of MP3, but not on Rockbox (MP3 player) or VLC

Reply #4 –
VLC and your external player are probably fading the file in on playback.