Wrong track duration detection by the Poweramp

[ufedor]

Hello,

For some reason, the duration of the track is not determined correctly.
Example (in appendix):
Poweramp: 4:05
EZ CD Audio Converter: 4:29.374

Sincerely,
Fedor Baev

03 Secret Forest.aac

[andrewilley]

Duration information should normally be provided within the metadata content embedded in the file, but this file doesn't contain that information. So Poweramp will try its best to guess the length of the audio content based on the actual data size, but with variable bitrate compression that's not always very accurate unless you first decompress the whole file to PCM (which clearly is impractical when scanning a whole library). I suspect that's what you are seeing here.

Playing the file in foobar2000 for example continues up to 4'29", but it does not show a seek/progress bar as it doesn't know an accurate end point for the display. VLC tries to work out an endpoint, which fluctuates up and down from around 5'40" for the first thirty seconds or so of playback until it settles on a value of about 4'28"-4'30". 

Andre

[ufedor]

You wrote:

> So Poweramp will try its best to guess the length of the audio content

What is the reason "to guess" if it is possible to calculate?

As EZ CD Audio Converter does...

 

[andrewilley]

16 hours ago, ufedor said:

What is the reason "to guess" if it is possible to calculate?

It's not possible to calculate accurately without reading and rendering the entire file to PCM (which a converter program clearly needs to do). That would be possible to do in the background for the currently playing file, but not ideal due to possible performance issues for playback on lower-end devices. For whole lists it would be impractical - especially as the duration should really be provided in the file header tags in the first place.

Andre

[w3wilkes]

I had a problem like this back in about 2003 with MP3 files that I'd ripped using Nero FHG encoder and VBR with highest quality settings. I did find a program called VBRFix that would analyze whole folders and correct the duration for each track. I now use DBPoweramp and LAME for MP3's, still VBR highest quality settings and track timings are spot on.

[maxmp]

@w3wilkes I guess it may be improved when (optional) scanning for replay gain, bpm, genre, AI song tags and lyrics guessing, etc. will be added, but it will tax phone CPU and battery a lot, so it won't be enabled by default, but still nice to have e.g. for DAPs, car headunits, and very high end phones 😉