Validate your mp3 collection

Most software mp3 players do not report playback errors which is not such a big problem most of the time. It can however become one when you copy the mp3 to a player, be it software or hardware, that does not play the file because it could not load the file because of verification errors.

While error correction may work often in those cases, it may be best to correct the issues so that you won't ever run into problems playing songs from your collection again regardless of player that you are using.

MP3val checks your mp3 collection for mpeg frame consistency and several other possible issues like the length of the stored VBR header.

It is possible to load the entire mp3 collection into MP3val and let the software check all of the mp3 files at once. It does that really fast and either reports a Problem or OK as the state afterwards for each individual mp3 file it has checked.

The problem is mentioned once you click on the line of the mp3 file in question. A total of 16 different problems can be found by MP3val and it just takes a click of a button to fix all of them. Every fourth mp3 on my computer had a problem which I did fix automatically with the application.

MP3val creates backup files of every mp3 that is fixed by it in case that this process does not complete or deletes information in the file that the user did not want to delete.

Please note that the program has not been updated since our initial review of it. It does work however well even on new versions of the Windows operating system that came out after the last version of the program was released.

You can use the view menu to filter the list of files loaded in the program by state. Here it is for instance possible to only display files with problems, or files that have been checked.

As far as repairs go, you can either have the program fix all music files at once, or only a selection of them. The program is available for the Microsoft Windows operating system as well as a Python GTK GUI file.

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