The VideoLAN Forums

I am using VLC to play local AAC files on my iOS phone, streamed to my car stereo with Bluetooth. The status screen on the car does not properly show the elapsed time or the total length of the song. If I pause and unpause the song, then it properly displays again. Is this a problem with VLC or my car’s software? (I have a somewhat similar issue with the YouTube app, but not with Spotify)

I also notice that loading new songs causes it to briefly play, then buffer for about 1 second. Although this doesn’t happen with all of my files, so I wonder if it’s an issue with my variable bitrate or something and not a problem with the app. And to be honest it’s not that disruptive

I think the reason there’s no progress bar is because it reads the file as a stream of audio instead of a playback? I’ve noticed on the iOS home screen it says “live” and there’s no option to pause, only to stop the stream. Upon pausing and unpausing in the app, it now reads as a playback as normal. Every time it finishes playing the current song and moves onto the next song, it switches to a livestream and usually has that stuttering audio in the beginning.

By observing the progress bar in the app, I see that the total time of a song sometimes gives a wildly inaccurate answer, which is gradually honed into an accurate measure of the song’s length after a few seconds. I thought that a song’s length was stored in its metadata? Is this not the case for AAC? Could this also be why it reads as a live stream of audio because it doesn’t know the length of a track when it first begins playing a song?

After converting all my files from AAC (or mp4/m4a I guess) to FLAC, all the above problems immediately disappeared. I guess VLC has better support for Vorbis metadata than ID3v2?

There is probably something wrong with the AAC files where VLC fails to calculate the duration. You are welcome to send me one of them so we can take a look.