Sansa Fuze ultra-slow playback on some songs from CDs

[Cars066]

I recently went and resurfaced or cleaned some CDs, ripping them to my computer afterwards. ALL of the songs played fine on my computer and my Zen (some with an occasional glitch), but some of the songs on each of the older, more worn of the CDs play extremely slowly (10 minutes or more for a 3 minute song) on my Fuze. Perhaps they are corrupted, but if so, why do they just play mega-slow? I know this is not occuring with normal songs because mint-condition CDs play all songs at the same playback speed when ripped to my computer and put on my Fuze 2GB. Perhaps the occasional glitches in those songs cause the player to read them extra-slow? Somebody please help or at least explain why this happens.

[CrowdAds]

[dfkt]

I'm fairly sure this has nothing to do with the CDs, but with the software you used for ripping them.

The best program you can use (especially for old/scratched/unreliable CDs) is EAC with the LAME MP3 codec. Both are free software. Here is a good tutorial on how to use it:http://www.fryth.com/eacfaq/

[Cars066]

Originally Posted by dfkt

I'm fairly sure this has nothing to do with the CDs, but with the software you used for ripping them.

The best program you can use (especially for old/scratched/unreliable CDs) is EAC with the LAME MP3 codec. Both are free software. Here is a good tutorial on how to use it:http://www.fryth.com/eacfaq/

I think I will try this, but then why do the songs play fine on my computer and zen?

[dfkt]

Cause portable players can be a lot more picky about improper encoded files and tend to act up more than Winamp, WMP, etc.

What program did you actually use to rip these CDs?

[Cars066]

Originally Posted by dfkt

Cause portable players can be a lot more picky about improper encoded files and tend to act up more than Winamp, WMP, etc.

What program did you actually use to rip these CDs?

wmp 9 or 10 and express rip. but the thing is i get cd's from my brothers and other people and burn them and i can't get them back, is there something i can do about the songs i already ripped, or something i can do w/ my player? are you sure its the software and not the player being defective?

thnx

[Skinjob]

Originally Posted by Cars066

wmp 9 or 10 and express rip. but the thing is i get cd's from my brothers and other people and burn them and i can't get them back, is there something i can do about the songs i already ripped, or something i can do w/ my player? are you sure its the software and not the player being defective?
thnx

I agree it's likely to be an encoding problem. I've never heard of this happening before and it only happens to some of your files. So it almost has to be something specific to the files themselves.

If you ripped straight to a lossy format (like mp3), then there's not really a good solution to correct an encoding problem. You could use LAME to try and decode/reencode, which might fix the encoding problem, but then the files would have gone through two lossy compressions and sound quality would be noticably impacted. You could always try it and see if the results are acceptable, just make sure you keep the original files in case it doesn't work out.

For this reason, if you're going to do any significant amount of ripping or if you may not have access to the CDs later, it's always best to rip to a lossless format (like FLAC) then transcode to a lossy format for portable use. Then you can always transcode/reencode as many times or as many different ways as you want without problem. Not to mention you can reproduce the original CD from the lossless files.

Also, I agree with dfkt about EAC. I exclusively use EAC+REACT to rip to FLAC. However, there's a pretty steep learning curve. If you find EAC a little overwheming, you might also want to check out dBpoweramp. It's not nearly as customizable/scriptable as EAC+REACT, but it's more user friendly and has more or less the same secure ripping capability as EAC.