Hugo’s blog

People (and that includes myself) often write to complain about stuff, and rarely praise people who do well.

I feel like I need to do the latter here. I have been frustrated by Flash not playing certain MP3s right. Investigating the problem, I found that MP3s with a bit rate of 48kHz were the ones causing problems, and looked into documentation on the Web, only to find out the following:

It may interest you to know that I was using MP3s that were encoded in iTunes at a 48kHz sample rate. Flash MX resamples all audio down to bit rates in increments of 11 (11, 22, 44, etc.). That resampling caused the percieved slow-down in pitch.

Here, I had the source of my problem. I only have a low number of MP3s encoded as such, so I thought about reencoding them. But I thought that I should report the bug to Adobe, just in case it may lead to a fix. So I found a Web form to do so. Coming to think of it, I actually didn’t use the right form, I should have used this one instead.

Anyway, I tersely described my problem, not having too high hopes as I usually feel like feedback forms are black holes. Exactly 8 minutes and 11 seconds later, I received an email from an Adobe engineer sent from his Treo, pointing me to the latest beta of Flash and instructing me to test the latest beta version and write back if it didn’t fix my problem. Impressive.

So I’m happy to report that version 9.0.60 is perfectly playing my 48kHz MP3s as I write this.

My iPod has been signaling me that the iPhone is coming up soon by slowly dying. Considering the price of the iPhone, I thought I’d look at alternatives, and I ended up transforming my iPod into the iPhone of the poor: not as cool, not as powerful, but much cheaper – a 6th of the price. I documented my experience (setup and results); I wanted in particular podcast synchronization to work seemlessly, just like it did with the iPod.

I’ve been subscribing to more and more podcasts, as I like it to listen to radio shows when it’s convenient for me: in the subway, when I run, in a plane, etc.

However, I discovered in the past week a weird problem: the duration of some podcasts is very short. I have some that last 7 seconds, others that last 20 seconds. And this despite the MP3 being its normal size. 20 seconds for a 50MB MP3, that’s suspicious!

An example of this is La Revue de Presse de France Inter. The MP3 file 7.3MB, iTunes says it lasts 7 seconds, so does my iPod, and only plays those 7 seconds. This same MP3 played by RealPlayer, MPlayer, VLC, QuickTime, lasts 7:54. I have a similar issue with the RTL Podcasts.

Having a closer look at the faulty MP3s, they seem to have an introduction music, and then the show. And the length advertized by iTunes and the iPod is the length of this introduction. I’m wondering if the MP3 specification has an end-of-file marker, and whether those podcasts are just the concatenation of the introduction MP3 and the show recording. As I could not find the specification despite following links from the Wikipedia MP3 page, I am making a lot of guesses here.

However, I tried a few more players (Creative Muvo V200, mpg321, etc.): none of them complains about the format of this MP3, for example, and they all, except iTunes and the iPod, play it in its entirety. MP3 Checker calls the MP3 good, and doesn’t report any error, though I don’t know how reliable this tool is.

I’m wondering if this isn’t a result of the update to iTunes 6.0.2 and of the iPod firmware 3.1.1 I did a few days ago.

Assuming that this isn’t a problem I’m the only one to see (though a number of searches on the Web didn’t confirm this), somebody who can actually do something to fix this will notice the problem. Or so I hope.

Update (2006-01-17): RTL’s Webmaster wrote to me and told me that it was indeed due to the new version of iTunes, and that the new editions of RTL’s podcasts would not have this problem anymore. Cool!