About ripping with VBR
 

I've noticed something peculiar lately. I re-ripped my entire CD collections, using MP3 encoding with Winamp Pro, the "alt- preset fast extreme". When using this preset, I noticed that Soulseek (file sharing program) will interpret these VBR files as CBR. People looking at my files see whole discs that are at 80kbps, sometimes at 128, 160, 96, etc. Even though I know full well they are all VBR 200+. IS there any fix to this problem? Thanks.

dont steal music, and dont share yours :hang:

obviously that program doesn't understand the vbr header :blah:

Don't listen to people who don't know the meaning of theft. :p

But I'm surprised about Soulseek, I found quite a few vbr files there with the comment "ripped by Winamp" that showed up correctly in the search results.
Are you perhaps using a 3rd party mp3 input plugin that messes up the header while attempting to tag the files?

Well yeah, I also noticed on my RCA Lyra MP3 player that anythign that is my own Winamp rip, that it doesn't recognize the last latter of each Artist, Title, and Album. I'm going to just to a quick re-tag of all of them with Tag & Rename and see if that fixes the header. The only thing I could see messing up the header is that I have the toaster plugin, but I don't think that affects encoding.

Is that the only 3rd party plugin you have?

You can use this to save a list of your installed plugins.

Well I also use "Tips" which is just a supplement to toaster. Other than that, just the MSN LIve! Display plugin, which is also made by Shane Hird. And media players still read the tags right. It's just soulseek is reporting CBR bitrates,s oemtiems as low of 80...can't really brag about literally unfindable album (even on the internet) that says it's only 80 kbps. hehe.

You can give that neat little program VBRFix a try. Just Google it.

Soulseek probably doesn't understand the xing vbr header, and incorrectly reports it as CBR. Windows media player/directshow will report them incorrectly as well. There is nothing wrong with your files that needs fixing.

VBRFix can remove the xing header and make a new normal one iirc, which would fix the problem.

As an update, I just reformatted, and a fresh copy of winamp 5.23 with no plug-ins, jsut ripped a cd using preset fast extreme, and still getting the same problem, soulseek reported it as 96 kbps