Fixing MP3 files with unrecognized Duration tags
I have many MP3 files ripped with WMP 9 or later that have the duration recorded as 0:00 seconds, or as some low, but still incorrect figure. I reported this problem some time during v9 (and submitted samples to one of the WMP testers), but have not seen any reply/fix/improvement. There's no particular pattern as to which files missed out on getting this, but it's pretty widely scattered over many dozens of albums. None of the tracks are VBR - most are 160kbps. The major problem with this lack of timing field is that you can't burn audio CDs that include such tracks.
I was hoping to use a WMP Auto Playlist to pick out all these files. The syntax restricts me to looking for Music in My Library: Length (in seconds) Is Less Than 30. Once done, however, WMP shoots me a an error dialog "The Property was not Found" and a link to an unhelpful
Web Help page, and no items are returned.
If I go to the All Music list in my library and sort by Length, then I find the hundreds of items which satisfy the query I tried to create above. To get a count, I should just be able to select them and shoot them over to the Now Playing List, but WMP watchers know that will simply add every file from the current list (in this case ALL FILES). Instead, I create a new static playlist that gives me a count of 741 zero-length files, with a total estimated time of 5:15hrs and file size 1.25GB.
If I inspect the ID3 tags of randomly selected files, using MP3Tag or DBPoweramp utility, I find that, in fact all have reasonable and consistent length tags which seem to be inaccessible to Media Player and Explorer.
NB Playing the files in WMP does NOT update this tag.
I dug around on the net and eventually hit on this Winamp trick from the
WMP 10 FAQ. The article references Winamp 2.x, but I used Winamp 5.07 and I modified the tip thus: clear one set of tags, update, copy tags over, update, clear other tag, update, copy tags over, update. It does work, but very tedious, and I would still like to know why some tracks ripped from a single album are affected in this fashion.