A Track Within a Track? [SOLV'D]

Sometimes when I download a track from something, I'll run it through a program like MPC, and find it's a certain amount of time long, and I listen to it and it sounds fine. But then when I play through it and skip to certain parts, I find those parts are relocated to a different time than they were before. So then I go back a bit, and find a whole new part has been added to the song that wasn't there before. And yet the amount of time hasn't changed? But when I play it from start to finish, that whole new part is gone again.

Other times, it'll have a larger time in MPC than it will have listed in the details, or in anything else. For example, there's one track I'm listening to right now that opens in MPC as about 10 minutes long, but the details say six minutes, and iTunes plays it as 6. Both versions of the song sound coherent. It's like two songs in one file.

EDIT: After listening through it on iTunes (where it says it's six minutes), after it reached the end, it kept going on a bit longer. And this version is still different from the 10 minute one.

How does this happen? How do I alternate or split the two?

There are files such as APE that hold the entire CD or such in a single file. What kind of file is it?

Hmm...
Y'know what? Here's the file itself. It's a remixed version of a Natasha Bedingfield song that was used as the ending credit sequence to Goldeneye: Rogue Agent. (Right click the link, hit "Save Link As"). Maybe you can figure this thing out. Because it has me baffled. (And I'd certainly appreciate it a lot.)

Hmm, well, it's just a single file ... there aren't any other tracks tucked away within it. There's no errors and everything looks like its been encoded properly. I've had MP3 files using VBR display the incorrect time before, such as a five minute song appearing as a twenty minute one before, so that discrepancy is not out of the ordinary. What you're probably hearing when the song reaches the end is the player desperately trying to seek to a playable time frame since it cannot use the phantom data its been told exists. The true length of the song is 6 minutes and 49 seconds ... any other time displayed is simply an error by the player.

EDIT : Actually, since there was a problem with the VBR header, we can fix that. Snag the following file, add the MP3 and hit the 'Go' button at the bottom and it should fix the header issue. The time still might be a little off, but it should be leaning more towards correct than it was ...

http://home.gna.org/vbrfix/

But the song does play two different ways. Not just in length, but in the way it sounds. I played MPC alongside iTunes. The words were the same, but there were tiny instrumental details in MPC that weren't in iTunes, and so the words actually came in at different parts, and slowly the lyrics got further away from each other.

And MPC goes ten minutes. I mean, it doesn't seem to just stitch in a random part of the song. It's coherent. It flows into it. As for the iTunes version, it does keep playing after the timer runs out, and once again it's coherent. It doesn't sound like it's forcing in a random part of the song to make it last longer.

And the one thing it doesn't do is play 6:49 and then stop. MPC goes for 10, and iTunes displays 6:49 but keeps going. None of my programs can play it at 6:49 and then stop. It's just... how does it play two different versions of the song, and both of them go on longer than they're supposed to?

Use the above program to correct the VBR header. I kind of made the edit while you were typing up your post, heh.

Ok, so I used the program, and the result was...

Well, now MPC displays 6:20, iTunes still displays 6:50, and Realplayer displays 8:32 (The same as it did pre-using the program you showed me.)

iTunes no longer plays beyond the song. It stops at 6:20 after a guitarish solo that sounds like a legitimate ending. So does MPC. So does RealPlayer. But why are they still giving me different times? 

EDIT: Listened to all three again at the same time. They started getting inconsistent around 4:30.

I'm going to have to go with that it's an issue with each of the players in general. I really don't know enough about the MP3 format to point to any specific reason why the discrepancy would be occurring. All I can say is that the proper play time is 6 minutes and 49 seconds ... well, that's what the stream data within the MP3 file says, anyway. Everything else, while at least being listenable, is apparently incorrect.

Keeping in mind that 6:49 is apparently the true time of the file, I opened it in Audacity, hoping Audacity would read such. Audacity did indeed read 6:49. Then I exported the file with Audacity. And the newly exported result reads 6:49 in every program. I don't know what voodoo Audacity did to that file, but it fixed the problem anyway.