itunes vbr and time estimation

[rojazz]

A recent switcher (used to have tons of Macs, then jumped on the Windows boat a few years ago, but I recently got back with a new tiBook which I love), and a music lover, I've transferred my 30gb of mp3s from my pc to my mac.

I'm kind of an audiophile, so I've ripped my mp3s on my pc with Exact Audio Copy and LAME, using VBR, and expected that iTunes would be able to have no problems with it (as I also have an iPod and it was reading the vbr header pretty well). However, I've noticed in the past few weeks that many of my mp3s in my iTunes list have their lengths incorrectly estimated, and because of this, CDs aren't burned correctly (some tracks have 30 seconds to a minute of silence at the end, and because of this I can't burn as much on a cd). The only way around this is to decode the files to aiff, import them back into iTunes, and then burn the cd, but that's really a hassle.

So my question, why the hell can't Apple get iTunes to support VBR right? It seems to have no problems with its own VBR encoding features, but for some reason, only a portion of my own rips from EAC and LAME are messed up.

I know there are vbr header fixes for Windows (I've used them in the past), but would such fixes work on OSX? Are there any vbr header fix apps for OSX? Is there an easier way to burn mp3s, because this is just a hassle.

Point in case, I have a copy of The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka, which uses four cds that you play at exactly the same time. Because the times are f***ed up in iTunes, when I burn the cds, each track will have a different length even though they're all supposed to have the same length. But because iTunes can't read the vbr header right, the times of the songs are different.

Sigh, if this is too overly confusing, let me know and I'll make an attempt to explain it better. But please folks, help me out. I know there's a bunch of people out there having similar problems, and there's really got to be a way to fix it.

 

[ramseyt]

A quick fix that may help. But I'm not sure this applys to burning a CD.
You can tell iTunes when you want a song to end. You can define the start and stop time. Just do a command i on the song and adjust the stop time. I don't know if that time adjustment will burn, but it might be worth a try.

 

[rojazz]

i tried that, but it just cut the song down. when playing the music in itunes, as an mp3, it thinks the music file is actually that length. it's not until it burns the file until it realizes that the song really isn't that long, and adds the silence to the end.

to show how much of an issue this can be, for example, i've got a copy of orgy's cover of blue monday in vbr. even though the song is only 4 minutes long, itunes thinks its about 8 minutes. so basically at the end of the song on the cd, there's 4 minutes of silence...kind of a pain in the ass.