VLC Getting Track Time Wrong

[misha-studio]

VLC has been my media player of choice for a long while now, mostly because it's versatile and nowhere near as moody as Windows Media Player (which has re-arranged, re-named, etc. my tracks many times without permission). It's been working just fine, with no issues that I've noticed aside from lagging with gigantic .avi files. (But that's mostly my system's fault, I'd imagine.)

Anyway, today I noticed that it's started behaving strangely. It wasn't doing this yesterday, and I know because I was playing one of the exact music files affected and it was not affected then. Now, it's adding random amounts of time to seemingly-random tracks, some as many as a year or two old and some much newer. Mostly, it adds 1 - 4 extra seconds. On some, however (mostly the newer ones), it's suddenly adding as much as ten extra minutes.

The ones with major additions are on my flash drive, but the rest are a combination and in different locations. Some were ripped directly from CDs while some were transferred from an older system and some were downloaded as individual tracks. All are .mp3 format. I've found no noticeable pattern, other than the ones with the most noticeable time addition being newer and on my flash drive. It seems that many aren't affected, regardless of location or age, while several are - again regardless of location and age. The additions of more than four seconds only seem to appear on my flash drive's files, though not all tracks on it are affected, either.

When it miscalculates the track length, VLC still plays the song normally, and seemingly counts the elapsed time properly. In fact, it progresses at the normal speed across the progress bar, reaching the end at the end of the affected track/s and moving on to the next item in the playlist or repeating the track if it's the only one (as per my settings). However, it claims in one case that a song of 5:57 length is 11:35 in length. If I click the middle of the progress bar, it goes to the proper middle of the song yet claims I'm at the 5:35 mark. If I click the end, the same sort of thing happens. If I let the song play through, the elapsed time counts properly and it does not have a long pause at the end as it would if it were really adding silence the length of the added time. It just seems to be registering the incorrect track length down at the bottom where it lists the elapsed and total times.

Windows Media Player seems to recognize the proper length of the affected tracks I've tested, but I don't want to use WMP. It eats up a lot of resources and drives my hard drive crazy. (And it has a strange audio stutter when I'm playing large playlists while VLC doesn't stutter unless my system hangs.) Some of the tracks are also on my phone, and it claims the right track length.

Does anyone know what could be causing the sudden misbehavior by VLC? I know that the last time I used it (before attempting to play music again), I used it to convert a file. I'm not sure how that could cause the problem I'm encountering now, but it seems worth mentioning.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Reset preferences and cache.

[misha-studio]

Your sugestions solved my problem.On win7 i did All programs --> VideoLan --> Reset Vlc media player preferences and cache files, and now the Track Time is working fine.Thanks for help.

[lowsinyen]

Hi, I'm currently having the same problem with my VLC on Win 8.

I have an audio file which is 76 hours long. When I opened it with VLC, it shows 291 hours long. I need to fast forward the audio file to search for the specific content, but this cannot be done smoothly because when I pressed the right key, the audio fast forwarded but the content is the same as 10 secs before.

I've tried reset preference and cache, as well as uninstall and reinstall the player. It functions normally for shorter other audio files, but not the 76 hours. My Windows Media Player can recognize the correct track length, but I could not set the fast forward time to 10 secs.

I hope someone could help me to solve this problem. Thank you.