Help! H120 plays some mp3s and not others

[king_ginyons]

Hi everyone,

I have all my music in mp3 format and it all plays fine through any software (WMP, Winamp etc) on a computer. At last I have bought a player and the H120 I got I just love. However.......

.....some albums do not play. For instance if in shuffle mode, it picks one such song and displays it on the screen, pauses and then skips to another song. Ie the H120 seems unable to decode certain mp3s that I have (yet I know they work because they play using WMP). My only observation are that the songs/albums which dont play were not ripped from a CD and were encoded through a line in using a some software called Audiograber (I think...I didn't do it).

Can anyone tell me how I can get the H120 to play these songs.

Many thanks in advance.

[CheeseBurgerMan]

Do the files play on your computer?

[bobwise]

Originally Posted by king_ginyons

Hi everyone,

I have all my music in mp3 format and it all plays fine through any software (WMP, Winamp etc) on a computer.
Many thanks in advance.

Originally Posted by CheeseBurgerMan

Do the files play on your computer?

Cheeseburgerman, do you even read a post before you reply?

[iancraig10]

Are the songs that don't play downloaded or did you rip them yourself?

[seadzz]

sounds like the old corrupt encode problem to me. You could try to transcode them to another bitrate using dbpoweramp music converter (google to find) or rip from the source cd.

It could be a tag problem also....use a tag editor to double check that out too. The Godfather is a good version of freeware for that.

sdz

[Revenent]

Fire 'em up in Winamp and see if they're actually MPEG 1.0 Layer 3.

You might have some other MPEG type audio file.

[Traveller]

Originally Posted by king_ginyons

...if in shuffle mode, it picks one such song and displays it on the screen, pauses and then skips to another song.

Perhaps it's the 52-char file-name length limitation problem.

Make sure the files names (incl. the ".mp3" or ".ogg" extension) are 52chars or less. I use MS Word to check the char count.

[Doc Evils]

I used to get this too i nearly got a new mp3 player ebcause this

my first advice is download God Father from HERE and TDT here to sync your mp3s to your player. Now start up god father choose the directory where your mp3's are and choose the rename option. Now in Format options i use %A- %T for Artist - Title file naming and tick use case also tick trim results and from compatible drop box choose Xbox and tick the remove option unedeath it then click apply, your mp3 should be fine when you use TDT to transfer them to your mp3 since in TDT you further shorten the file automatically from menu options. Now i have no lag or stopping waiting to load files .

[Munki]

whoa, you guys confusin' me, sounds to me like the songs just have a license on them... maybe's you guys were saying that, only more confusing... all i know is whatever you said it went straight over my head

[king_ginyons]

OK,

Well firstly apologies for not keeping up with the replies. My entire computer went down and I'm only just back up and running. Thanks to all for advice.

I have some more information now. The files that dont play were all recorded from vinyl into the line in of a soundcard and ripped into mp3 using shareware called audiograber. When playing the files in WMP if I look at the properties it states that the file is MPEG Audio Layer-3 160kbps. SO why doesn't the H120 play it?

Thanks again.

[king_ginyons]

OK even though the files appear to be genuine MPEG mp3, and that they play on a computer means that somethings right. I agree with seadzz in that it may be an old/corrupt encode.

I cant see how the H120 can be 'made' to read them so it seems that the only route is to re-encode them using dbpoweramp. So my new question is if I transfer my 160kbps mp3s back to .wav and then re-encode them to mp3 what sort of quality loss should I expect? Plus will there ever be a firmware update which allows the H120 to play lossless .m4a files?

[FingerSoup]

I've used audiograbber for OGG files, and it works Great at a quality level of 6... However, If you're stuck on MP3, make sure that you are using the LAME encoder (Download the LAME zipfile and extract the lame_enc.dll to your Audiograbber directory) and not the included Frauenhoffer encoder Also, make sure you're using the 1.83 build 1 Freeware version currently on the audiograbber website...

Rip to MP3 via intermediary WAV file. If possible, save the WAV file just incase you need to re-encode again (it saves ripping time, but you may not have the HD space on your PC).

When you have a working Rip encoded to work on your iRiver, then you can delete the .WAV files if you've kept them.

As well, make sure that if you use the DB mode of your iRiver, that the filenames are less than 52 characters total. I suggest just being REALLY NEAT with how you store your MP3's and turn DB Mode off. It's faster that way, and there's no silly limits (Unless you have 9999+ files)...

[king_ginyons]

To summarise again, I have some mp3s which play fine on my computer, but not on my H120.

I chose to follow the route of many and transcode them back to .wav and then into mp3 again using the well recommended dbpoweramp. However when I ask dbpoweramp to convert these files it says they cant be opened yet they still play in wmp, winamp, realplayer.

Any advances on this so far unsolvable problem. Many thanks in advance, again! Ziggy

[Marwood]

King ginyons,
I don't if this will be any help.
Got a new 140 last week and got some brilliant advice from everyone. Yesterday, after lawn cutting duties I installed the latest firmware 1.65 (K), thanks to Whippy. That seems fine at the moment, although I was 'bricking it' in case it went wrong, the manual was far from confidence building!
Now I know that EAC is probably the best tool out there for ripping but I wanted something easy to start with. So I tried to 'drag and drop' 3 WMA files (max quality!) onto the H140. I'd had them on my laptop for a while and they were ripped using WMP 9. I was delighted to see them transfer quickly, BUT they would not play on the 140 even though they played on my laptop. I didn't dispare (unlike me!) I was sure I'd read something about problems with WMP 9 in a thread. Apparently, WMP 10 did not have the same problems.
However, I thought I'd ave a dabble with Mediamonkey, to run the files through that...no joy, It wouldn't even let me rip a CD, rattling on about some file error?!!? This I suspect was down to my laptop but I have no idea why it claimed there was no 'D' drive. At this point I stopped for a cuppa and some soft drugs.
This morning I have taken action. That monkey has gone back to the safari park to remove the windscreen wipers from other punters' cars! I have downloaded Audiograbber and am ripping my first CD, (Idjut Boys 'Press Play'), using LAME @ 192 with the normalization enabled. I got LAME on it by downloading it from the same site then unzipping the lame_enc.dll and putting in the Audiograbber folder. as previously suggested by FingerSoup (cheers mate!)
Audiograbber seems dead easy to use and I hope it will get me started. Have also taken the advice of Doc Evils in this thread!
Good luck,
I hope it works!
Marwood.

UPDATE. Its not worked. Had a fiddle round with the Godfather re naming and tagging, but I must have messed up somewhere cos the 17 tracks aint in the library no more. So I opened Audiograbber and dragged each track on to the 140. Well the 140 tells me that my 17 tracks are there (6 folders and 58 songs!!!????!!!), it lists them (not in order!) and then proceeds to play them BUT WITHOUT SOUND!! I think I now need some help!!
Any Ideas?
Marwood.

[duckweed]

hmm, i got some mp3 that crash my h120 (i had to reset) Its not really the same problem but its a possiblity

... the cause turned out to be some user tags of id3v2 .. i stripped the mp3s of id3v2 tags and just use id3v1 .. solved the problem for me

[DreamTactix291]

Originally Posted by king_ginyons

OK even though the files appear to be genuine MPEG mp3, and that they play on a computer means that somethings right. I agree with seadzz in that it may be an old/corrupt encode.

I cant see how the H120 can be 'made' to read them so it seems that the only route is to re-encode them using dbpoweramp. So my new question is if I transfer my 160kbps mp3s back to .wav and then re-encode them to mp3 what sort of quality loss should I expect? Plus will there ever be a firmware update which allows the H120 to play lossless .m4a files?

First point. The files could well be genuine mp3 but they could be some stupid thing like mp3 muxed in wav and renamed back to .mp3 (I had one of these recently - poor foobar2000 didn't have a clue how long that track was ) Either way the encode has something not quite standard about it.

Second point if you're speaking about Apple Lossless probably not. Maybe with Rockbox but since it's lossless you could just losslessly transcode it to another less-closed format (FLAC and WavPack come to mind). If you're talking about lossy AAC in MP4 (or M4A with is just renamed MP4) then probably with Rockbox. AAC is an MPEG standard.

[king_ginyons]

Well it seems to me that those few albums that I ripped using audiograbber are never destined to play on my H120. So for advice to others who wish to rip vinyl, if using audiograbber then as others have mentioned, definitely download the latest encoder to use. I personally think audiograbber is good software, but this is a nuisance problem. If anyone else out there rips vinyl succesfully to mp3 I'd be interested in hearing about it.

My final question to the community now is: There are those encoders which rip what is going through the soundcard. I forget the name of the software available. How bad quality is this likely to be. ie I play my mp3s on the computer and re-rocord them into mp3. How much poorer will those be bearing in mind that I am not actually tanscoding?

Ginyons

[vinylivo]

Hi Ginyons,

it surprises me that you're having so much trouble with playing music on your new gadget. I never had such problems, actually I just plugged my new iHP140 to my Powerbook and saved some music (mostly mp3, 128 to 192kbps) to the player (drag and drop). After unplugging (safely remove on win-machines, drive to trash on macs) I could start listening. So easy! (switched off the 'DB Scan' (database) option in the General Menu for faster booting)

For recording ('ripping') Vinyl records I can recommend Audacity, see
http://audacity.sourceforge.net
This is a platform independant and open source Audio Editor (& Recorder). This also has the advantage that you can record one LP-side in one go and do editing (cutting) afterwards. It can open and save in various audio formats (WAVE, AIFF, mp3, Ogg Vorbis).

And for repairing mp3's lossless I was already sucessful with mp3DirectCut (http://www.mpesch3.de). The only disadvantage there is that it isn't capabale reading and writing ID3 tags other than v3.1.

good luck, jvo

[Marwood]

vinylivo,
Thank you for your help. Well...I think I was trying a bit too hard, too soon when I got my player. I was over complicating the mindlessly simple and, well, I was in a bit of a flap. Apologies to ALL for my 'hijacking' of this thread! It's all sorted at this end now. I am really pleased with my 140. It sounds great, and I'm one of those retentive types who thinks they have the ears of an audiofiile. "Yeah...great," they say, "the women really love that...they salivate on the merest mention of the word Bi-wire! Keep it in the act, Marwood, they'll love that one."
Thanks,
M

[king_ginyons]

Hello all again,

Thanks vinylivo for the useful software recommendation. I am now thinking that my mysterious 3 albums which refuse to play on the H120 are just a pure freak of nature. I say this because of all of my albums (over 200 or so) work apart from 3. Those 3 were recorded from vinyl using audiograber. However I have used audiograbber to record 21 albums, and apart from the 3 duff ones, the others work fine. There is obviously some strange corruption in those 3 particular albums.......the wierd thing still is that they play fine on the computer (WMP, winamp, real etc..) although dbpoweramp does not recognise them as a valid mp3 format.
Ginyons