I've downloaded a couple of "full album" mp3's, and some of them are badly corrupted, others only mildly corrupted(ok - one or two had no faults to be fair).

There are usually small gaps at random spots in the songs, a tenth of a second missing here and there.
Or some strange "beeps" that shouldn't be there.

Is this due to something happening with the download, or what?

The last one was the whole DIDO album. It was encoded at 160kbps, which is not too bad.

And the download went at a speed of about 30KBytes/sec., no stops.

Still the mp3 has gaps in it here and there.

If this is a problem with the source file, it would be nice if people could "clean up" their mp3's, delete the duff ones, and not share ones that are corrupt.

Or are record companies deliberately putting up mp3's of low quality?

Not sharing duff files also goes for programfiles, of course.

-Check your files before sharing!

I stay away from full album MP3s because I think a lot of them come off the radio. A station here plays a complete album/CD every night at midnight and I know several people who record and burn them.

When I put a CD together it's a lot easier to just download each song. It's easy to weed out the ones that have problems and a lot simpler than having to put track markers in.

and if its not " artifacts " as I have heard them called then there is noise at the beginning, or the file is too small, and the song is missing some at the beginning or the end...check out r3mix.net and checkout how deep this guy is into quality mp3's

ok here's my 2 cents / i think some of it has to do with mp3 or wav editing software, mainly normalizing process. if it is normalized once or twice you probably can't tell the difference in sound quality but every time you do it, it adds up after exchanging hands many times with users (like me) that prefer to edit their mp3's.....
but i think most of the damage comes from multi-tasking or like playing quake or some other 3d shooter game while upload or especially downloading mp3's (das where them bleeps get in). unless everybody had alot of computer hardware horse-power we are probably gonna always have them bleeps.....

UPDATE:

I have since the first message(yes, that was me) downloaded some of the tracks one by one, because some of the tracks on the "full album" mp3 were corrupted.

I do have wave editing software(CoolEdit PRO 1.2a), and always load them up there 'cause I can usually remove the odd gap in there, or remove background noise if I have to (but that often introduces some other artifacts/noises in the background, so...).

When I download something, I never do anything else on the comp, so it's not multitasking on my side which is the problem.

More likely the guy/girl who encoded the mp3 did a lot of stuff while encoding, and therefore the file is "ruined".

Would be nice if people could check the files before they share them, but I guess most people aren't perfectionists like me.

Oh - the point I was coming to(but never did), was that even when I downloaded the songs separately, and chose mp3's encoded at 320 and 256Kbps, they still had gaps in them!!

But I think the theory about multitasking while encoding is probably the answer.

I've finally managed to get rid of them using the wave editor, so now I can listen to it on my stereo with no more frustrations.
I guess when you get something for free, you can't really complain, though...

My big gripe are MP3s that have been ripped at too low a volume.

Is there any way to normalize/increase an MP3s volume without having to re-encode it? Just curious.

--Nut
RAM disk is *not* an installation procedure.

You can normalize you MP3's as you burn them with "MP3 CD Maker" if you turn the normalizing switch on.

I've also used it to adjust the volume on a single MP3 by telling it I wanted to do a test burn, then aborting the process after the normalizing phase.

You can download it at: www.zy2000.com

If I also want to edit the MP3, I use Wave Studio to edit it and adjust the volume, then save it back to MP3 format (or just burn it from the wav file).