Track time counter issue?

[negcreep80]

Here's an admittedly odd idiosyncrasy of mine, but I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this and maybe has a solution for it in MM...

I often use the Start Time and End Time fields in the Details tab when I want to start a track at a particular spot in a song, for example if the track has a 20 second quiet intro, then a split second pause and then I want to start the downbeat at 0:20.500, for example. Usually I'll listen to the song and try to follow along with the elapsed time counter on the player and I can usually get it fairly close.

Now sometimes, I can do this with no problem...unfortunately, there seems to be occasional tracks where the counter doesn't seem to be absolute (if that makes sense)...What happens is that I'll see what should be the gap at 0:20, so I'll change the start time to 0:20.500, but when I go to playback the track, it is as if MM keeps the split second gap, so then music still comes in after a gap anyway, or even worse, it keeps the audio artifact from before the gap so you have a weird transition to the downbeat.

Does anybody do this as well? There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason on which tracks it will happen. And I had the same problem when dealing with iTunes, but I was really hoping MM would be more "precise" in this. I understand the most precise method would be to simply edit the mp3 file itself, but I liked the idea of being able to do this within MM simply using the Start Time field. Any thoughts or experience with this would be greatly appreciated, but if not, no worries....cheers!

[negcreep80]

bump...anybody have any thoughts?

[BKKKPewsey]

What format are the tracks in? If they are mp3 vbr then the seek times can be a bit hit or miss.

[negcreep80]

What format are the tracks in? If they are mp3 vbr then the seek times can be a bit hit or miss.

Thanks...as a matter of fact, I do have a mix of tracks (from different collections), some of which are VBR and some are CBR. That could explain why sometimes I can get it to work and others I can't. Is it simply the fact of it being VBR, or could it be the LAME codec I've been using? I like VBR as a way to keep file sizes down since I have a substantial music library, but if this is true, I may have to stick with a different bit rate.

Thanks again...I can't tell you how much I've been racking my brain trying to come up with a logical answer to this.