Album skipped on Sansa Clip+

[Plunk]

Hey, I have a playback problem with my Rockboxed Sansa Clip+. I have an album that simply won't play. The 9 tracks are automatically skipped with scratchy sounds until the end of the folder. The album was ripped in Ogg Vorbis using EAC in secure mode. I tried reripping it, I tried playing the files from the SD card and from the internal memory, but nothing changed.

I know that a lot of users reported very similar problems. As i said, only one particular album is affected (so far), which seems strange to me. Maybe something's wrong with the files or the way they were encoded... I don't know.

Any idea?

[bluebrother]

I don't see "a lot of users" reporting "similar" problems. This sounds like your files containing ID3 tags. Those are invalid in ogg files. Check the files -- some tools did create such broken files in the past.

Furtermore, have you created other files that play the same way (i.e. using EAC)?

[Plunk]

Well, I've seen very similar problems pop up once or twice in a few message boards. Anyway, I haven't found any other files that have the same problem yet. The tags were input by EAC (they're in the command-line options, actually) and I added a few things using MP3Tag (like the album cover). I don't know how to check if some ID3 tags were added to the Ogg files, but I have other Ogg files encoded exactly the same way and with the same kinds of tags that work perfectly fine.

[evilnick]

IIRC, EAC has an option to add id3 tags to *any* compressed format - despite id3 tags being nonstandard for vorbis (and other) files which you need to make sure is not ticked.

http://www.head-fi.org/t/427460/flac-and-id3-tags-in-eac has a little more detail.

[bluebrother]

I don't know how to check if some ID3 tags were added to the Ogg files, but I have other Ogg files encoded exactly the same way and with the same kinds of tags that work perfectly fine.

Open the file with a text editor (notepad is sufficient for this). Check if the first characters read "ID3". If they do you have ID3 tags in your file. If the file is a correct ogg vorbis file it starts with the characters "OggS".

[Plunk]

Hey, sorry for the lack of answers. I worked around the problem by reripping the specific album that wouldn't play on my Clip+ into FLAC. It plays fine, now.
But as I suspected, I have the exact same problem with 3 other albums. If I don't find a solution, I guess I'm gonna rerip them into FLAC as well, but I did what you advised and opened the faulty files in a text editor. They all begin with "OggS" so I guess they don't contain ID3 tags. I tried comparing them with working files, but I didn't spot any significant difference. I mean, they all start with "OggS" and then there's just random characters.

I've only found 3 albums that won't play so far. All the others play fine, and they were all encoded exactly the same way. I really don't see what can cause this.

[saratoga]

If you post a track that has this problem, maybe someone can take a quick look at it. 

[Plunk]

There you go >> http://www.sendspace.com/file/q5yu19

And here's another that has another weird playback problem >> http://www.sendspace.com/file/43vygi
The song always plays at max speed, like in fast forward. It's an AAC file this time, and only a few tracks on the album have this playback issue.

[saratoga]

The top one fails because you've attached an enormous JPEG to the track.  The Ogg suggestion the metadata be small is not to be taken likely, their parsers will not handle large attachments. 

The second one seems like some strange bug in libfaad where the sample rate or possibly that an LC file is misdetected as HE.  I would file a bug report on our tracker for that one.