About 2/3 of my MP3 library is corrupted. Some of them are really quiet, some have a delay in them (ie same sound played again a moment after the original) and some have a weird high pitched warbling noise in the background with heaps of distortion, like they were encoded at a really low bitrate. The only thing I can think of that I've done differently recently was to defrag the drive they're on with Norton Speed Disk.
So far this problem shows up in OS X QT Player and iTunes, with all other apps closed. I haven't tried any other players or OS 9.
Is there some way I can recover these files?
HFS+ drive, OS X, iTunes, OS 9 Norton Systemworks 1.0
Have you tried burning some of the songs as an audio CD? I'd be interested to know what the CD ends up sounding like.
Has this corruption been getting worse as time goes on or did they all just get corrupted one day?
Either way, to me it sounds like hard drive issues (maybe logical or hardware).
Try uploading one of the mp3's that obviously has a problem and see if we get the same symptons. (no i am not advocating piracy, i'm just really curious if is the mp3 or your system).
Nope, it all just appeared at the same time as far as i know, or at least in a range over a couple of days. I was downloading some old radio plays and they previewed fine at first in Poisoned via Quicktime Player, then after they'd downloaded some more (they're 30 minute eps) they played corrupted. Then I noticed lots of other file had the same problem.
Hmmm. They're playing fine now. I think it might be a CPU overhead issue. Often when I'm online, the CPU meter sits on 97-100% for some time (iTunes, Poisoned, Eudora, Safari, XChat Aqua, Copypaste and the Finder, sometimes Acrobat Reader and Textedit on a G4/450 upgraded beige G3 with 512MB) CPU is running at between 50 and 80%. So I guess that was the problem...
Wow, Poisoned must be a real hog.
Set poisoned's processor priority to low and see if the mp3s play better.
I had no trouble do simular things on a 333 iMac. Defrag the harddrive?