[X] Errors in file after tagging

[ParrotSlave]

I have discovered something strange; I don't know whether or not it's a bug, but it appears to be. I used mp3Test to check my music files, and it found errors in one folder, from .44 to 1.15%. These files I originally got from vinyl, using Sound Forge, to produce wav files, which I then used dBPowerAmp to convert to mp3 (dB gives better quality options than SoundForge.) I never needed tags, so I did not add tags until about 4 years ago.

I just found an old external hard drive I had misplaced for several years, and it had my original conversions of those files, the mp3s I had made immediately after converting the vinyl to wav. These files had no tags.

These original files all had very low "error" rates, typically .02% or so. So I copied the tags from the files with errors, using MP3Tag, and pasted the tags from the files with good tags but with errors, onto copies of the old, low-error files. These files with fresh tags now all had high error rates, identical to the ones in my main archive. So I tried again, this time doing the conversion manually--via the ID tag editor, one line at a time, and manually copying the album art, using MP3Tag to put it on the Windows clipboard, and pasting the album art via the properties tab. The manual conversion had higher error rates than the original, but not as high as my archived.

For instance, for the file "The Surrealist Waltz," the original file with no tags showed .02% error. The file on my "main" storage (the one I keep to listen to the music from) showed .63% error. I copied the clean file, the one without a tag, and put the tag on two different ways, with mp3Tag, and manually. Manually, I ended up with a .27% error, but with mp3Tag, I ended up with .63% error, the same as my "main" archived file. (The "manual" way involves dB poweramp's integration into my system, not pure Windows.)

I have just sent a query to the maker of mp3Test to see if they know of an explanation, but I thought I should post this here also. Since I use non-standard tags sometimes--for instance, there is a tag, "Comment," with the words "from vinyl" on each of these tags--but that doesn't explain why there is a different error rate doing the same thing manually and with mpTag.

[garym]

not sure what it means to have a .02 error or .63 error. But you might also install foobar2000 and verify integrity component, and then in Utilities, use the "verify integrity" option to see what you get there.

[ohrenkino]

Could it be that this program does not know how to cope with tag data but thinks that this is also audio data?
What to other programs report about these files? So in short: I do not think that this actually a bug.

[chrisjj]

Thanks for this report. Please post a single file before tagging (ideally small), full details of the tagging steps performed (ideally minimal), and the file after tagging showing the problem.

Chris (a program user, not developer)

[ParrotSlave]

I had forgotten about using Mp3val, so I used it to check all the files, and the problem in most cases is garbage at the beginning of the files (although, with tag-less files, it thinks that the lack of tags is an error also.) In other words, Mp3Test will give a %, Mp3val will tell you what the errors are and will fix them. Using Mp3 tag 2.55, the files with zero errors result in zero errors after adding the tags. However, using Mp3tag 2.55 on files with garbage at the beginning seems to increase the garbage some. Identical files with errors gave a huge increase in errors with Mp3tag 2.53, which is what I had been using with the original post, with .02% going to .27%, but with Mp3tag 2.55, the increase is only from .02% to .03%. Of course, with various Windows updates, etc., I can't truly say with certainty that the issue is with the different versions, since there are other variables. I would either have to uninstall and reinstall the older version and try again, or, I think that I may have Mp3 tag installed on my old (emergency) laptop, which I will have to dig out just to keep Windows updated anyway in a while. But at this point, it appears that just using Mp3val on everything will keep the problem from occurring.

It appears that the issue is that the tag program somehow magnifies certain errors--????

These are rather large files (the one I referred to specifically is 8.05 mb), but I could put them into a Dropbox folder or something like that. Although this would be for educational purposes, and would therefore not violate copyright law, I could understand how the RIAA might get upset that a copyrighted work was available in its entirety, and could be downloaded. I was thinking about using MP3 DirectCut to trim the file to a short enough length that there would be no copyright concerns, but when I tried that, the errors disappeared.