Home/ Questions/Q 8272851
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-08T07:16:09+00:00

Seeing as how MP3 frames are (mostly) independent units, I thought it would work

  • 0

Seeing as how MP3 frames are (mostly) independent units, I thought it would work well to simply concatenate several tagless MP3 files together in order to merge them losslessly.

However, as it seems, many player programs (including mplayer and mpd) seem to be detecting the file length in some way that I cannot find documentation for, and only see and play the part corresponding to the first of the files I concatenated.

Whatever this information is, I’m sure it can’t be too hard to write a program to remove and then rebuild it, but I have no clue what it is. Does anyone know?

Just to make sure: Yes, I removed the ID3 tags of all the files.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Ah. I found the mp3val program, which I tried running at the resultant file after concatenation, and it told me that the file contains a “Xing header” which, while masquerading as an empty data chunk, apparently contains redundant information about the number of frames and length of the file.

    It seems to be made for VBR files, but these CBR files contain it nonetheless. Either way, Google does point to a lot of information about the Xing header, which appears to be what I need.

    • 0