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Topic: Getting unexpected MP3 sync words (Read 2460 times) previous topic - next topic
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Getting unexpected MP3 sync words

Hi ... I'm writing a player in Java for Internet radio stations using the Javazoom library to do the MP3 decode. It's all working pretty well apart from a 'hiccup' in the audio every 5 seconds or so. I've traced this down to where the decoder gets MP3 frames with a non-standard syncword i.e. usually it  is 0xFFFFF330 but every 5 seconds I see a frame with the top byte set to something different e.g. sync word 0x9EFFF330, 0xCDFFF330 etc. I searched high and low on Google to see whether sync words other than 11 leading 1's mean anything specific but I can't find anything relevant.

Can anyone offer an explanation for these strange sync words please ?

Thanks
Ron

 

Getting unexpected MP3 sync words

Reply #1
Radio stations usually send the name of the song currently playing each x seconds. I don't know if that might be what you're receiving. Do you see anything resembling text after that sync word?

I don't have information about that, but maybe looking about shoutcast and streaming might help.