Install MP3 Diags in Ubuntu 11.04 (Corrupted MP3 Header fixing app for GNU/Linux)

Not just MP3 files any file in general has a portion called a header. But only concerning MP3 files in this instance ... that header contains details such as the bit-rate that has to be used to play the file properly, meta information (artist/album/year... type details), sample rate, preferred audio levels, etc.

Even if you have a bit buggy audio file still if the player is powerful enough then you can play it even after having those errors BUT, there can be occasions that unless you fix the corrupted header, the playback is impossible.

And to make things worse, sometimes, a MP3 track that plays "perfectly" fine in a one player might be "unreadable" in another one. So in those circumstances, our only hope is to find a way to fix that corrupted header.

In that case there is an excellent application that's written for that exact purpose called "MP3 Diags". But remember, there are certain errors which are not fixable, or permanent, so don't hope for wonders here :).

Main features...

*. You can graphically access (its' written in GTK) more than 50 different MP3 header file settings.

*. Fix broken tag information.

*. Find and remove duplicate tags.

*. Find and fix missing album art/cover files (within the tag of course).

*. Add normalization details.

*. Character encoding errors (for languages other than English).

*. Correct MP3 files that show incorrect playback duration (very useful, this is usually caused because of false bitrate values).

*. Change bit-rate values (remember, just because you change the bit-rate won't let your 32kbps low quality audio to play in 320kbps..., those are not fixable by using any app. But it'll help as mentioned above to fix some "wrong" playback duration type errors).

*. Fix MP3 file seeking errors.

These are few of its main features to mention. But as you can see already, MP3 Diags is pretty useful tool nonetheless.

And also if you don't have much of a technical knowledge about how to apply these settings, then it even has an automated options (4 presets) using which you can let it automatically detect and fix several things (as in the below screenshot).

If you want your MP3 files to have album art images added then MP3-Diags is also capable of doing that using online sources such as "Discogs" and "Musicbrainz.org" or you can manually assign a picture if you like as well.

If you use Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 or 11.04 Natty Narwhal, then you can easily install MP3 Diags using the below command.

sudo apt-get install mp3diags

Remember, especially if you do mass file "fixings" then make sure to first back up your source files (which can be done through the app it self as well), because there can be occasions where it can damage the files (rarely, but possible) :/. But remember, when properly used, it is one of the best/powerful utilities that's I've come across so far nonetheless. The developer do deserve some additional praise, well done :D.