Full albums merged as single MP3 now moving to new files partway through playback

[Simsha]

Hello.  Have used Poweramp since time began and have generally been able to figure out any unexpected behaviour.  This one has me stumped, however.  I prefer to listen to albums as the artist intended and have quite a number where I have merged an entire album into a single MP3 file.  Currently on build 838, previous versions have played these large files without issue.  What happens now is that at the end of a song within certain albums, Poweramp wil jump to the next album/file in the queue instead of completing the single long MP3 file that it is playing.  This does not happen on every song but is repeatable on those that it does. Tested on other media players, these files play through to completion as expected.  As part of the process to try and fix this, I have cleared the Android app data and rebuild the app database.  Extensive experimentation of various outputs and buffer sizes along with jump and shuffle options have not seen any improvement.  Is there anything that I have missed?

[djdarko]

@Simsha

Are you using CUE files with your MP3s? or are the cue sheets embedded?

What happens if you skip into the album, and manually check those songs that are being missed?

Also, try updating to version 839.

[Simsha]

Thanks. Updated to 839 with no change. Not using any cue sheet excepting what is probably auto created when the album is merged into one file.  The program that I use for this is http://www.makeitone.net/audio/mp3albummaker.htm

[andrewilley]

It does sound like the merge program may have caused some glitch within the file that is causing Poweramp to skip at that point. Either that or you do have CUE files referring to the long-file. 

Personally, I would not normally try to merge existing MP3 files, I would re-rip the whole content into one WAV file and then covert that to an MP3 (I use Exact Audio Copy for ripping, and LAME for MP3 compression).

Not sure why you feel the need to do this anyway though, why not just save separate MP3 files and play them back in album order?

Andre

[Simsha]

Thanks Andre. Agree that this is now not the best way to do this but these files were done a long time ago for simpler music players and ease of storage.  They play fine and I would like to keep playing them. 

The cue file idea seems to be on the money though.  I just ran one of the offending files through MP3DirectCut and stripped any rogue embedded cue file.  That fixed it although it will be a bit of a chore needing to now do this for each file as the skips show up.

Given that these always used to play without issue, has something recently been changed within Poweramp to recognise cue files?  If so, can I kill it?

[andrewilley]

CUE files are separate text-files (sidecar files if you like) which contain text names and timecode pointers to define 'pseudo-tracks' within one large audio file. They are not contained inside the actual audio file itself.

However an app that cleans up audio block data (such as mp3DirectCut, which can re-write the file again block-by-block) will definitely help to clean up any rogue join errors within an MP3 file. I use mp3DirectCut too by the way, it's got a really clunky old interface that seems left-over from about Windows 95, but it does the job well. It can run in Batch Mode by the way, so you could just give it all the files that were made in this manner and let it get on with doing a simple re-save of all of them. I would suggest keeping backups of the originals for the time being though; just in case anything goes wrong, you don't want to mess up your only copies.

Andre

[maxmp]

Can you please share (the smallest) file which reproduces the issue in Poweramp? I guess these are glued together mp3s with trailing ID3 or other tag (Poweramp will/should stop playing on trailing tags to avoid noise), but I can say for sure and tweak player for such kinds of tracks if I have it. Sending can be done via Poweramp list / Select / Send / Gmail / gpmaxmpz@gmail.com. Thanks!

[Simsha]

Thanks Max.  I have sent you a dropbox link as the test file is a bit large.  I will attempt Andre's batch processing suggestion as I do suspect this is largely caused by sloppy encoding in the merge program moreso than an issue with your app. V3 is probably just more critical with proper encoding.

[Simsha]

I think this is solved. Thanks for all replies.  Working on a hunch that the original encoding of a lot of these files was not the best, I ran them all through MP3 Validator http://mp3val.sourceforge.net/

This showed many had issues and was able to batch repair almost all of them.  The resultant files all play fine.  Not sure why most worked in V2 but failed in V3.  Perhaps the new audio engine is simply more demanding.

In any case all is now good and I have learnt a lot about MP3 file structure as a result.  This is also the first time I have ever needed to seek support for this awesome media player and I am very appreciative of how quickly and accurately it was offered.  Well done guys.