If I view my Music library by Track, and sort by Duration, I see a handful of files that have absurd durations… up to 31 hours. (pic below)
Plex refuses to play these files… Playback starts, but there is just silence. In the past, Sonic Analysis used to get stuck on them. (Fortunately, they taught it to skip them because this prevented SA from completing its run back in the day.)
In any case, sorting your library this way can give you a to-do list of things to fix.
But how to fix them?
Interestingly, every other mp3 player I have tried plays the files fine, and a handful of mp3 validator tools also see these files as OK. All of the automatic fixer utilities I have found pass these files through unchanged. Whatever is wrong with them, a lot of tools cannot see it.
ffprobe, however, shows a variety of errors.
I have tried using ffmpeg to rewrite the bad files (-c copy), and what happens is it creates a tiny output file that has no audio data.
The only way I have found to fix files like this is to convert to WAV and then reencode. That’s obviously not great. If anyone has a tool that will magically un-screw files like this, I would love to know about it.
