[MPlayer-users] Playing severely damaged MP3 file

[Reimar Döffinger]

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.

> 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.

> 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).

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger