Live Freezes when playing/previewing MP3 files

[negativeZero]

Hello,

It didn't look like too many people were having this issue, and it plagued me forever. I would drag a MP3 to a channel (or even try to preview it) and all of live would just freeze. As soon as live had to "decode" any MP3 file, game over.

This was only happening on one computer, my laptop running the same version (Live v5.1.3) would import MP3s just fine. So if it wasn't a Live program bug, then what gives.......

I found the answer almost by accident, while troubleshooting something completely different. I was having issues with Nero v7.x.x.x burning crap audio CDs. While searching for the solution to that, I came across that Nero 7 installs three MP3pro.dlls that it uses for decoding MP3s and burning them to CD. Well good ole Nero 7 came with a version of MP3pro.dll that doesn't work to well with Windows XP. They recommended copying over the existing file with an older version (I found that v2.0.0.11 works great).

After I did this, Live magically started working with playing MP3s again!?! Why? Well once installed, windows registers the MP3pro.dll for ALL default decoding. With the newer version put on by Nero 7.x.x.x, Live wound up using this too. Once I rolled it back to version 2.0.0.11, both Nero and Live were as happy as can be.

So moral of the story, if live is having any MP3 issues, do a search for mp3pro.dll and see what version is installed. Hopefully this can save someone the weeks of fustration and troubleshooting I went throught. Good luck.