I have some music files which have somehow the wrong bitrate settings (32 instead of 320). Yes they are really 320bps, the file size and show exactly that. So this means no Apple Music availability. I tried changing the values in the iTunes XML file, but that did nothing, as kind-of expected. Other programs also show the wrong bitrate or none at all. Searching for 32 in a Hex-Editor of that file was useless as well.
How to change the bitrate field of an mp3 file
itunesmp3music
Related Solutions
Right click the book in iTunes, and select Get Info (or select the track and Press Cmd-I)
iTunes will open the Info for the file. Goto the Options tab and change the Media Kind of the file from Music to Audio Book. It will then appear in the right place.
I dissected the XML file a bit and it turned out to be a XML property list (sort of a XML-based JSON equlivant), so it becomes easier to handle. If the files affected have the same name not counting its extension, some Objective-C can be laid down to change it. Do you have Xcode installed or should I prepackage it for you?
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Best Answer
Sorry but if the file has been encoded at the wrong bitrate, then they'll need to be re-encoded i.e. you'll need to rip them from a CD again. The bitrate refers to the amount of data that is used to store a second of audio. There is no way to increase this, in any meaningful way, once it's been created.
However if the file are encoded with Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding there does seem to be a common problem where the bitrate is misreported. If I'm reading things correctly it's because software like iTunes just looks at the bitrate of the first chunk of the file (which might just be silence or something simply resulting in a low bitrate encoding) and report that as the bitrate even though subsequent chunks might have completely different (higher) rates. There does appear to be a tool to fix this called
vbrfix. However there doesn't seem to be an easy to get this tool for Macs.If you are relatively confident with using the Terminal you could try the following:
cdto the path of the unarchived files./configureand thenmaketo compile thevbrfixcbinarycdinto the "vbrfixc" folder and you should find thevbrfixcbinary../vbrfixc -log input.mp3 output.mp3.If the file is a VBR MP3 file this will attempt to fix it by placing a blank chunk at the beginning of the file with a bitrate that is more representative of the entire file.