Some ripped songs sound garbled/distorted in iTunes? by starly396 at 5:01 AM EDT on August 23, 2016
Ever since a year or so ago, when I import certain video game soundtracks into iTunes they sound quite distorted and muffled, but there's no issues when I play them in other audio programs like foobar.
Interestingly, when I convert the song to another format within iTunes, and play the converted file in foobar, it sounds distorted exactly the way iTunes does.
I contacted iTunes support about this back in July, and after over a month of follow-ups the iTunes engineering team actually investigated the issue. Unfortunately, the latest response I have from them is that it's not iTunes' fault, but rather that the .mp3 is improperly formatted/encoded. I have a hard time believing that considering the predictability and wide range of soundtracks to which it applies, but I've yet to respond.
Has anyone encountered this issue? The troublemaking .mp3 is here for your perusal. I've about had it with iTunes, unfortunately my vast library is on it.
The only way around it, is to convert it IN foobar2000, or something else, and then play it in iTunes. If I convert an mp3 in foobar2000 to, for example, m4a, or aac, or even just wav, and play that in iTunes, it plays OK.
The real solution here is not using iTunes. I mean, ignoring all of its other features, just looking at it as a media player, it's absolutely atrocious. Foobar2000 is lightweight and feature-full; I'd give it a try.
I've never quite found a perfect replacement for iTunes for my purposes.
I keep every soundtrack in a separate playlist, and foobar really doesn't scale well to hundreds of playlists. It also doesn't have playcounts afaik, which I enjoy having from iTunes. Playing FLACs is of course awesome though.
Tomahawk looks much more similar to iTunes and works well, it just doesn't let you import an iTunes library (but I can import playlists one by one). If that's the best alternative, maybe I'll spend a lazy Friday night migrating.
The problem I've noticed with converted things getting garbled in iTunes is to do with the output files not being 44khz. Any kind of unusual khz will result in iTunes not being able to decode them properly and giving those weird chirps etc. The solution is to use a DSP in foobar2000 to make it output 44khz regardless of input. The strange-khz files should play fine in most players, but use the DSP if you want them suitable in iTunes as well.
This file appears to not only be an oft-unused sample rate (32KHz), but it also appears to use CRC16, not only the header protection CRC16, but also the LAME VBR header total file protection CRC. Feel free to tell Apple about that, and ask that they support standard MP3 features.