Qustion about MP3 times as reported by totem plug-in and mplayer

["Mark Hull-Richter" <mhullrich gmail com>]

I noticed something really odd with mplayer's information when playing MP3 files.

I have lots of these, many organized into m3u play lists, mostly
albums.  But I noticed something really odd when I play the MP3s with
mplayer - the time signatures are often way off.  For example, on the
Moody Blues song, Never Blame the Rainbows for the Rain, the actual time
of play is 4:57, but mplayer shows it as "A: 297.8 (04:57.8) of 462.0
(07:42.0)  1.0%" at the end of the song (i.e., it thinks the song
should be 7:42!).  Also, Nautilus shows this MP3 as being 5:14 (via the
totem plug-in).

On the original CD, the time is printed as 4:57, and both the Gnome CD Player and Sound Juicer say it is also 4:57.

I created the MP3 by using the Sound Juicer to extract the files to
.flac format, then a script I wrote that plays the .flac file back into
the lame encoder, so there are a few potential culprits here.  I'm
using Sound Juicer 2.16.0, flac-1.1.2-27.x86_64 and
lame-3.97-1.el5.rf.x86_64 for the ripping/encoding and
mplayer-1.0-0.34.rc1try2.el5.rf.x86_64/mplayerplug-in-3.40-1.el5.rf.x86_64
for the playback.

Can anyone explain the discrepancy here?

(I am also asking on the rpmforge email list in case someone there knows....)

Thanks.

mhr