The thing is that I needed to verify all my APEs (~23k) and that takes about a week on my machine running non stop. So after some cleaning up of filenames, I thought what the heck, I might as well bring them all up to 3.99 and convert them from "high" to "normal" in order to further reduce system resources (scarce asset on my EPIA board
).
As I understood it, the thread with the reported problems had something to do with an external tagging utility being used which wasn't 100% compatible and screwed things up. I have only used MC and MA with APEs, so there is no risk of contamination there.
The only APE problems that I had were related to files which had a few seconds of complete silence in it. These files showed as corrupted in MA verify and I believe they are the result of some negligent homebrewing on my part where I mistakenly used a 40 instead of an 80 cable on two IDE drives.
Althought the system should have picked that up, about 1% of the files ended up being corrupted. The good side of it is that I keep two sets of external backups so restoring was easy.
I also noticed that during the APE2APE conversion process all the tags from MC are completely maintained! I do hope that there are no other side effects of the conversion process that I may have overlooked. If there is anything I should watch out for, please let me know. Thanks!