Songbird can't play some MP3s.

I ripped them at 192 Kbps. However, when I look at the properties of these files, some are 189, some are 190. Most are still 192. I don't know how this happens, but even the ones at 192 have the same problem.

That shouldn't be the problem then. Overblown really high codings caused problems. 192 is normal.

Could you try to import those songs again?
Delete them from your library and have songbird import them anew and see, if that solves it.

Deleting and re-importing didn't fix anything.

Could you provide us with a sample? One of those garbled files should do. Could you upload it somewhere?

Really odd. Mr Corgan sings quite fine, when I listen to that mp3...
Let's get crazy. Could you open that exact link you provided in your songbird and try to listen to it, while it streams from there?

I can't open the file by File->Open Location. I receive an error saying "Songbird encountered the following media more error: Could not read from URL ..."

I downloaded the file and played the file use File->Open File and it still sounds bad.

After this experiment, and If it sounded this way in other media players, I'd concluded that it had something to do with my hardware/operating system. But it only sounds this way in Songbird.

I downloaded Media Player Classic to add it to the list of tests. The tracks sound fine in:

Media Player Classic
VLC Player
Foobar2000
Windows Media Player.

Songbird (at the moment) is the only application having trouble.

Incidentally, this problem applies to every song on this album. This is the only album that is affected this way (out of 43 on this PC).

BTW, I'm going to delete the track from the site around noon today (GMT-7).

I meant, that you browse to the website in songbird. As soon, as you do that, songbird discovers that file and lets you play it online, without having to download it. That's the beauty of songbird ;-)

Could you try to do that? If that is working, something really odd seems to be wrong with your setup.

Ok, sorry for the delay. Tried that and it didn't work either... still sounds bad.

Than obviously something is awfully wrong, either
a) with your songbird installation or
b) with the sound setup on your PC (unrecognized odd hardware).

Next step we take would be to install songbird again and see, what happens.
1.) Uninstall and re-install songbird.
If nothing changes,
2.) Uninstall songbird, delete your profile folder in your user settings (on XP: C:/Documents and Settings/"username"/Application Data/Songbird2), install songbird 1.0 and start fresh.

A word of warning though. Deleting your profile sets you back to square one again. All settings and installed addons you made till now will be gone.
But sometimes that is, what it takes to solve the problems.

Be sure to come back and tell us, what happened.

Tyler out!

Before I get to that, I am going to install Songbird on identical hardware/OS configuration (everyone here has the same setup) and try to play these tracks to see if it is isolated to this machine or at least to our corporate build.

If the problem persists on the additional hardware here, I will try it at home (I typically use a media center app at home with no problems) using Songbird.

I will let you know how these experiments go in the next few days.

It may be, that your built of windows is different and some .dll's are different or just plainly missing for example. Would be nice to have it tested on multiple machines with the same OS. Thank you!

Song played fine on identical hardware and OS in our company... the problem is definitely isolated to my machine.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it has something to do with Codecs. For one of my projects, I had to install my client's codecs for video. It seemed to me that it installed more than video codecs, perhaps the MP3 codecs were replaced with substandard codecs. Does this make sense? Or am I lost on this one?

Did you use VBR by any chance?

Ok, to answer the VBR question. As a rule, I don't. But these files look like they might have been ripped that way and I'm not sure how.

Secondly, I've reproduced the issue on another machine by installing the KLite Codec Pack with the Media Player Classic player. Uninstalling the codec pack, however, does not fix this issue.

At this point, there is one album that I can't play in Songbird. It's not worth reinstalling Windows, etc. I hope this information helps the Songbird developers.