[ILUG] MP3 oddities

[Niall O Broin]

I've often noticed that some of my MP3s end abruptly, apparently before the
end of a track, but I've never bothered investigating. I was just ripping a
couple of CDs this evening when I noticed this happening with a newly ripped
CD, and it seemed to be severe, so I looked into it. The CD was Mary Black's
Speaking With The Angel and the track listing is as follows
 
Track title             Time   MP3 time
 
Big Trip To Portland    04:34  01:33
Bless The Road          03:44  03:08
Broken Wings            05:32  01:28
Cut By Wire             04:28  02:40
Don't Say Okay          03:55  03:06
Fall At Your Feet       03:38  01:05
Fields Of Gold          04:21  02:30
I Live Not Where I Love 05:12  01:22
Message Of Love         04:03  01:33
Moments                 03:53  02:20
Speaking With The Angel 03:26  01:13
Turning Away            04:54  03:19

As you can see, every track from this album is truncated. I also ripped Roxy
Music's Avalon this evening - 4 out of 10 tracks on that are truncated, and
a third album is a total mess - a bunch of 0 length MP3s and only one track
from the album actually the correct length.
 
The Time column comes from the database (q.v.) and the MP3 time comes from
examining the MP3 file with Perl's MP3::Info module. The database time
agrees with the times on the CD sleeve to a second or so.
 
My MP3 tools of choice are Grip & DDJ (Digital DJ) and to quote the author
 
DigitalDJ is an SQL-based mp3-player frontend. It is designed to work with
Grip. When Grip encodes mp3 files, it will place all of the song information
into an SQL database. DigitalDJ can then use this information to create
playlists based on any number of criteria.
 
Grip can be configured to use various rippers and encoders - I'm using
cdparanoia to rip and lame to encode, and my hardware is an Asus 8x DVD. DDJ
can use various MP3 players - I use mpg123 - though I'm sure that's
completely irrelevant.
 
I'm going to throw something together to go through my entire MP3 collection
and check the database against the actual lengths, but I wonder does anyone
have any suggestion as to what might be causing these truncated encodings ?
 
Software versions are kernel 2.2.18 (earlier MP3s made on earlier kernel
versions), cdparanoia III release 9.7, LAME version 3.70
 
 
Regards,
 
 
Niall