middleaudio.com

So I did playback for a Christmas dance recital with files provided on a flash drive. Skipping past the awful quality of most of the tracks, one title in particular had a strange little quirk. When looking at the properties of the file, it showed a length of 20:02, but when opening the track in SoundForge, it was in fact only 2:47. When playing the track in Winamp, in stop, the "time" display read 20:02, but as soon as you hit play, over a matter of 5-10 secs it counted down to what was eventually the correct play time, and then went on from there to time properly... all the while playing the audio correctly.

New one for me.

Yeah weird. Must be something funky in the metadata if the audio played without hitches.

I didn't have a lot of time to mess with it. I would be curious to look into it to see what exactly was going on.

Even though it did play OK, one copy of the file that I tried playing in my cue system read a third total time and stopped a minute or so shy of the actual end of the track.

I agree, most likely a meta data issue. I just hadn't seen that particular set of symptoms before.