GUI for mp3val, a MP3 validator and repair utility
is a tiny command line utility (for Windows and Unix) that knows a lot about the MP3 format and is quite good at detecting and repairing common problems. Depending on the encoder and tagging tools you used, your MP3s might be more or less broken; sometimes it’s just an incorrect length information (which might then cause incorrect playing time calculations). Mp3val can correct most of these errors.
Since mp3val operates on the MP3 frames and not on the decoded audio, it’s fast; the operation is mostly I/O bound so it’s probably as fast as your disk.
Anyway, mp3val is a command line utility, and I know that some people aren’t too comfortable with command line tools. Here’s a screenshot of the GUI:
As you can see, it’s a three button application. Select the “Fix files” toggle if you want files to be repaired, then press “Add” (while the added files are processed, the “fix” button is greyed out). Then wait for the progress bar to finish.
The scrolling window below will print the warnings and errors emitted by mp3val. As you can see I have a few files with incorrect size information.
There are still some improvements that could be made. For example, the application could keep track of the “broken” files, so that they could be processed using mp3val in a second run without having to recheck all the “good” files. Brokenness-statistics and an sortable list view of the detected errors would also be interesting. But I consider none of these features to be important; I’ll just let mp3val run over my collection and fix the files. It never trashed a file for me so far (but fixed some that didn’t work), and I can still re-rip the songs when needed (but I’ll choose Ogg Vorbis then as audio format).
The application is a tiny PyGTK script; that and mp3val is all you need. It should work on Windows, too, but I can’t help you with that.
Another “Pymp of the day” - “Python mini project”, done in just an hour. :-) Python and PyGTK are great for protoyping and mini applications. I love your work. Thank you!
[Update: mp3valgui is now on mp3val.sf.net and in CVS on sourceforge. Further development will happen there.]