Alpine CDE-122 MP3 "Unsupported" Issue

[daBee]

Hi folks.

My Alpine CDE-122 car stereo is giving me a headache with some MP3 files that are "Unsupported" (actually, "Unsupport"). I have no clue why. If I have to redo the MP3's, I can, using ffmpeg, but I need to know what the problem is first.

Anybody know why this is happening?

Anybody know how I can fix this? I'm assuming this is a software/meta tag issue with the files.

Cheers

 

[Mark Tillotson]

Find out what type the files are to begin with, and how they differ from working ones, there will be a suitable mp3 analysis utility somewhere, OS dependent... A possible guess is they are variable rate - hardware mp3 decoders tend not to support these IIRC.
Also they might be some other filetype, mislabelled as .mp3?

 

[daBee]

Ya I tried that. I don't know what to look for.

I've checked the kind and bitrate in iTunes and I can only think it's a tag version of some sort. The unit is kinda old, but that shouldn't screw things up. I thought someone in here might know what to look for.

 

[daBee]

Ya I tried that and found nothing. I'm a software developer so I tried re-sampling them and that didn't change anything that I saw. I should look into some tag analysis for differing files.

No mislabelled filetypes.

 

[MAAC0]

Try this:
Get foobar2000
Right mouse button Rebuild MP3 stream and / or Fix VBR header. I do it mainly to remove those volume / replaygain / comment tags ??
Get MP3tag
View extended tags and look for obscure tag types.
Bear in mind IDv4 tags aren't supported yet by many gear. Write IDv3 tags.
Perhaps large or non Jpeg covers embedded ??

 

[davidsrsb]

What bit rate, some early IC based players had a limited range and only Mark said, only did CBR

 

[daBee]

Try this:
Get foobar2000
Right mouse button Rebuild MP3 stream and / or Fix VBR header. I do it mainly to remove those volume / replaygain / comment tags ??
Get MP3tag
View extended tags and look for obscure tag types.
Bear in mind IDv4 tags aren't supported yet by many gear. Write IDv3 tags.
Perhaps large or non Jpeg covers embedded ??

Looks buggy, foobar2000. I'm a developer, so I have found some tools to look at tags. I'm thinking the IDv4 tags are the issue, as this unit is old. I haven't gotten to it as it's the season for boozin, eatin, sleepin, and haircuts.

 

[daBee]

There were several things wrong so specific Mac software worked best. Tag info revealed version 2.3.

 

[dangus]

I'm pretty sure the only problem I had with an early hardware player and VBR MP3 is that the player tried to play them as CBR, which made them sound very odd. Since it was an electronic music mix tape, it took a while to figure out it wasn't supposed to sound like that. I don't remember tags ever being a problem, other than that the first couple of MP3 players I owned didn't use tags at all.

There was a proprietary format called MP3Pro that RCA's Lyra MP3 players supported, and not much else; if your music came from questionable sources like P2P shares, someone could have used that setting thinking it had to be better than regular MP3. Or seeing as MP3 may have become a generic term for digital music files, someone could have put the wrong file extension on a wma or aac file. A wrong file extension may not matter to the player software: Winamp is playing an mp3 file just fine even though I changed the file extension to .wma

MediaInfo is a good program for examining audio and video files.
MP3Tag is great for viewing/editing tags; it can apply tags based on filenames, or fix the filenames based on tags.

 

[daBee]

Ya I've decided to just go with the Aux cable. MP3s are slowly moving to "Unsupport".