[MPlayer-users] Playing severely damaged MP3 file

[The Wanderer]

Reimar Döffinger wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 09:35:53AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> The latter two also print the title, artist, album, and related
>> info without complaint, so presumably the file header is present
>> and at least relatively undamaged. However, the file does not
>> successfully play.
> 
> MP3 does not really have any file header, and this information is in
> teh id3 tag _at the end_ anyway.

Er, yes. I remember that now.

>> What are the chances of there being anything which can be done to
>> recover or repair this file such that it is playable again? I'm not
>> even completely sure that I'm on the right track removing the zeros
>> (since there is a smaller but still large block of them near the
>> beginning of at least one other file which plays fine), except that
>> the file is not recognized as MP3 at all without them removed.
> 
> Remove only those at the beginning, or use mplayer -sb ..., that
> should be enough.

Cut out the initial 100k of zeros with dd, and it seems to play well
enough. Thanks for the tip. I vaguely seem to recall having done
something like this before and had the results be not nearly this good,
but so far the only problem has been a single audible artifact at the
very beginning...

Ideally I'd prefer to get it playing fine (barring the unplayability of
certain sections) with mpg123, since that's the standard MP3 playback
tool I use with moosic and I want to be able to have the file play
without intervention when it happens to come up in the playlist, but
that's beyond the scope of this list.

>> Playing redacted.mp3.
>> libavformat file format detected.
> 
> At least if you get MPlayer to use its demux_audio demuxer it should
> skip the zero-blocks without problems (except maybe some stuttering
> and high CPU usage).

I don't see any indication of how to do that in '-demuxer help'; I tried
'-demuxer audio' as the least obviously not it, and that exited
immediately without any sound. I've poked around the documentation a
little bit without finding anything obvious; any pointers?

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.