Signs that a file is damaged
- It skips, crackles, or jumps in the middle.
- It stops before the end of the song.
- It shows the wrong length, or will not open at all.
- One player refuses it while another plays it.
Four kinds of trouble
A corrupt file breaks in the middle. An incomplete file stops before the song ends, for example when a download stopped early. A file that will not load may be fine as a recording, but DJ software cannot open it: it exists only in the cloud (OneDrive or Dropbox), it is empty, it is not a type of file the software plays, or its path is too long for Windows. A very short clip, under 90 seconds, is often a sound effect or a song that was cut off.
In the 60,902-song library we built the tools on, there were 202 corrupt or incomplete files, 265 files that would not load (220 of them M4A, 43 WMA and 2 with paths that were too long) and 469 clips shorter than 90 seconds.
How Repair My Music will check your library
The Broken files tool will do this for a whole library, or for one folder that you choose, such as a USB stick or a new download.
- It reads each song all the way through. Every song is read from start to finish, the way a player would read it, and the program counts the errors it meets, and it also compares how long the song really plays with the length the file claims. You do not have to listen.
- It sorts what it finds. Damaged files, files cut short, files that will not load, and files too short to be a song go on separate lists.
- You listen and decide. Play a file from the list, then keep it or remove it. Removed files go to the Windows Recycle Bin.
A full scan of every song took about 7.7 hours on our library, at about two songs a second, and it runs in the background, and you can stop it, and carry on later. The scan only reads your files, and it changes nothing until you choose.
When a song shows the wrong length
An MP3 file stores its own length, and a player shows that stored length, so a song can show 25 minutes in the player and play for two and a half. This can happen when a file was cut short, or edited by a program that did not update the length, and it makes a broken song look complete.
Broken files compares the length the file claims with the length that really plays, and it lists the song as cut short when the file claims more than 3 seconds longer, or more than 2 percent longer when that is a bigger difference. We tested this on made-up MP3 files whose stored length we changed on purpose. A file that claimed ten times its real length was listed, and so was a file that had been cut to a third of its length while still claiming all of it. A file that was out by one second was not listed, and neither was a file that claimed a shorter time than it plays. An MP3 file with no length stored in it gives the scan nothing to compare, so a cut-short file like that is listed only when it is under 90 seconds.
Broken files lists these songs and does not correct the stored length. MP3val and MP3 Diags can correct the length stored in an MP3 file.
What to do with the files it finds
- Replace them from the original source if you still have it, and this is the only fix that brings back sound that is missing.
- If your library holds another copy of the same song, the Duplicates tool ranks a copy that plays cleanly above one with errors, so you can see which copy to keep.
- If you have no replacement, listen and decide whether the song is worth keeping as it is.
- Anything you remove goes to the Recycle Bin, where you can restore it.
How Broken files compares with MP3val, MP3 Diags, and foobar2000
MP3val is a free, open source program that you run from a command line. It checks that an MP3 file splits cleanly into MPEG frames and that the frame count and length stored in its header are right, and it can repair many of the problems it finds, but it does not decode the audio inside the frames.
MP3 Diags is an open source program with a window that finds more than 50 kinds of problem in MP3 files, such as broken tags and headers, a missing VBR header, and low-quality audio, and it can fix many of them, including wrong song lengths and seeking problems. Because it changes the files, its own documentation advises you to back them up first.
foobar2000 is a music player, and its file verifier, a component in older versions and built in from version 2.0, checks files for decoding errors by decoding them, and for most file types it only catches errors that stop the decoding.
Broken files reads every song all the way through, the way a player would, and counts the errors it meets, and it works on MP3, MP2, M4A, WMA, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, and OGG files, on a whole library or on one folder. It also compares the length each file claims with the length that really plays, and it lists files that will not load and clips under 90 seconds. It does not repair anything, so when you want a wrong length or a missing header corrected inside an MP3 file, MP3val and MP3 Diags can do that, and Broken files lists the songs that need it.
Facts about the other tools were checked on 14 November 2026. Sources: MP3val documentation; MP3 Diags; MP3 Diags, gHacks; foo_verifier, foobar2000.
Why it finds files and does not repair them
A damaged song may be missing real sound that cannot be recovered, so the safe answer is usually a fresh copy from the original source, and a tool that pretended to repair the file could hide the damage without bringing the sound back. Broken files finds the problem for you to check.
It runs on Windows first. Read about Broken files.