Posted by AK on 08/20/06 15:56

Hi all,

I've just purchased a Creative Zen MicroPhoto 4GB player, and I'm
facing the following problem:

Some audio files (particularly ones encoded at a low bitrate - 16kbps
to 24kbps - these files have just speech in them, no music) are playing
at a slower rate than they should on the mp3 player, although the same
files are playing all right in Winamp and Win Media Player.

On the Creative player, although the track length (in minutes:seconds)
is displayed correctly by the player, the file itself is playing at a
lower rate than it should (consequently the speakers' voice sounds very
heavy and slow), and the progression of the song "timer" is slower than
it should be; for instance, for one file its playing at a rate such
that 40 "player" seconds = 60 "real" seconds (hope that makes sense).

I downloaded this small program called mp3fileinfo and used it to check
the header info on the file

ID3 Tags : ID3V1 and ID3V2

Header:
MPEG : MPEG 2.5 Layer III
BitRate : 16 kbit/s
Audio : 11025Hz Single Channel
Length : 2485 seconds

According to the technical specs of the player (also obtained online),
it should handle the following formats:
ADPCM, MP3, Voice Recording, WAV, WMA, WMA DRM

Although I can't be sure enough to generalise, running this mp3fileinfo
program reveals that my audio music files (that run fine on my player)
are encoded in MPEG 1 Layer III, and some other audio speech files
(also run fine) are in MPEG 2 Layer III.

I'm don't know much about computer audio, so I'd like to know about
possible solutions to this problem... is my player not capable of
handling this format so I need to reencode my files, or do I need to do
something else?

Any help is greatly appreciated...

Regards,
AK

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