One folder of music causes MM to freeze [#12433]

[Aelius28]

I'm trying to get a particular folder full of 13 mp3 music files to play in MM.

Whenever I try to play them (whether double clicking the files, dragging to the Playing Now section, or dragging to the library), MM becomes unresponsive and requires termination.

These same 13 songs play perfectly fine in foobar2000 and Audacity (an audio editing program), so the files aren't corrupt.

Other songs play perfectly fine in MM, so MM is not broken.

Moving the songs to a different hard drive and trying to play them from there did not make it work, so it's not the hard drive's fault.

These 13 songs also cause MM to freeze on another computer I tried to play them on, so it's not just my one computer's fault.

I can't think of any other way to troubleshoot this further, this is just the weirdest thing Any ideas?

[Lowlander]

Offer a sample file that causes this to support: http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/inde ... ets/Submit

Note there is a 2MB attachment limit so use a file service like dropbox if larger and add link to support ticket.

[Aelius28]

Offer a sample file that causes this to support: http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/inde ... ets/Submit

Note there is a 2MB attachment limit so use a file service like dropbox if larger and add link to support ticket.

All right, I submitted a ticket. Here's one of the files, if you're interested in checking it out for yourself. (Note: you might have to "Save Link As" if it tries to play within your web browser; that will get it to actually download the mp3.)

One thing I noticed just now is that Windows does not display the bitrate for any of these problematic files, even though it normally displays the bitrate for audio files. Not sure if that's significant or not...

[Helpful Soul]

The file plays in mpc-hc64. The MediaInfo was as follows:

Code: Select all

General
Name: 01 - Prologue - Requiem.mp3
Format                         : MPEG Audio
File size                      : 3.41 MiB
Duration                       : 2mn 13s
Overall bit rate mode          : Constant
Overall bit rate               : 128 Kbps
Album                          : Game Music Volume 1
Track name                     : Prologue - Requiem
Track name/Position            : 1
Performer                      : Blizzard Entertainment (Tracy W. Bush, Derek Duke, Jason Hayes & Glenn Stafford)
Genre                          : Game
Recorded date                  : 2000
Comment                        : MP3 tags fixed by FluxCapacitor

Audio
Format                         : MPEG Audio
Format version                 : Version 1
Format profile                 : Layer 3
Mode                           : Joint stereo
Mode extension                 : MS Stereo
Duration                       : 2mn 13s
Bit rate mode                  : Constant
Bit rate                       : 128 Kbps
Channel(s)                     : 2 channels
Sampling rate                  : 44.1 KHz
Compression mode               : Lossy
Stream size                    : 2.03 MiB (60%)

Note the comment: MP3 tags fixed by FluxCapacitor

When the file was loaded into MM, MM froze. 101MB jammed into memory and 28% cpu utilisation on a quad core processor. But I was able (eventually) to get into properties. The artist field was full of code and artefacts. (I managed to copy/paste to find this stuff going on in perpetuity.)

Basically, MM couldn't read the artist tag and was stalling on it. It did however manage/quit on it in the end, but the player progress meter stopped responding while the file was still playing and I had to Taskman out of the mess.

So - loaded the file into fre:ac (no point in trying to do it in MM) to convert the file. NOTE: fre:ac showed the artist as unknown. fre:ac also played the file from it's very basic inbuilt player. Converted to flac using compression 6. This newly converted file (with a now blank artists field) plays fine in MM and no issues, but file size is now 10MB.

So - rid the comments field of 'FluxCapacitor' in the flac and then converted back to MP3 using the original settings (128MB; CBR: Joint Stereo). Resulting file size now 2MB (bound to be some loss) and plays/handles cleanly in MM.

Conclusion: MM tried to resolve a dodgy artist tag which everything else just skipped - hence the freeze.

As for your files, just convert them and all should be well.

[Aelius28]

Ahh, I never would have guessed that! Thanks so much for going to the trouble to figure it out!!

[Peke]

There is easier option as you can remove/crop tags in external Tag editor like MP3TAG and than rebuild them.
EDIT: Added as http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=12433

[Peke]

After deeper analyze It is not caused by artists field formatting, but by ID3 tag corruption, by header it is indicated to be in ID3v2.3, but half of the tag frames are in ID3v2.2. It is parsed wrongly then. ID3v2.3 have 4 bytes frame ID, but some of them have in fact are in 3 bytes (v2.2) - it leads to very long parsing of the result artists tag text (it has MBs instead of several bytes).

we'll try to find some workaround, so our ID3 lib will not return so bad results, and at least add some basic frame length checking, so it will not try to parse 2MB file byte after byte.

But basically tag needs to be rewritten to correct format and be cosistent with all fields.

[Aelius28]

Thanks for looking into this, Peke. Just so you know, this issue isn't an issue for me personally anymore, since I just re-encoded the problematic tracks into a new functional mp3. I'm just telling you this because I don't want you to feel needlessly stressed to rush to find a fix for this solely to help me out though I appreciate how promptly my ticket was dealt with and your continuing efforts to figure it out

Cheers.