Saved by VBRFix

So after years of using an Archos Jukebox to listen to my music collection on the go (I had actually ripped out the 20Gig drive that came with it and replaced it with a 60Gig laptop drive to fit it all), it finally died and wouldn't boot up anymore. I did manage to save the hard drive though, which is now living a productive life in Keith's laptop :) 

 

Anyway, I decided to try out the iPod this time around, and picked up the shiny new 60Gig video version. I was pretty happy with it at first, but then I noticed that most of my tracks would end prematurely, which was obviously not acceptable. It turns out that because I had encoded all of my mp3 files using VBR (variable bit rate) to save space and retain quality, the iPod was misreading the format. It apparently looks for a "Xing" header that is no longer used to identify VBR encodings, and if it's not there, it gets the time wrong and chops off the song.

 

The solution is either to re-rip all of the music (ugh!) or find some program to fix up the header. I tried out VBRFix which claimed to do exactly this, and after a day of letting my computer sit and churn through all my music fixing the headers, I now have an updated collection that plays perfectly on my iPod! Kudos to Will Wap and his handy VBRFix utility - you saved me weeks of re-ripping (or more likely, writing a similar utility myself).