Opening malformed MP3 files
From Audacity Development Manual
Revision as of 11:15, 15 June 2021 by PeterSampson (talk | contribs) (→Malformed MP3 error message: So the question is: How do I import a "slightly faulty" MP3 that plays in other applications)
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Malformed MP3 error message
Sometimes when trying to import an MP3 file you may see the following message:
Peter 16Jun21: ToDo-2 improve the image.
This indicates that Audacity's default MP3 importer detected an error in the file.
There are millions of "faulty" MP3 files downloaded from the Internet every day that will play correctly in other software, but not in Audacity.
So the question is: How do I import a "slightly faulty" MP3 that plays in other applications, but is rejected by libmad (Audacity's default MP3 importer)?
The answer is: Import it with FFmpeg instead of importing with libmad. There is a downside to using FFmpeg, which is that it does not support Metadata as well as libmad. FFmpeg misses the "Artist" and "Year" tags, while libmad supports all of Audacity's metadata fields.
