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[Deivit]

Hi,

Yesterday night I was listening to MC.11 and suddenly realized that the track that was playing did not have a tittle (name). I was surprised since I have all my songs tagged but did not give more importance to that and went to correct it. I was even more surprised since the song had lyrics which meant that, when the lyrics were added, the song had indeed a tittle otherwise Kings' plug-in had not found them.

I opened "Playing Now" to edit the song and realized that almost half of the files there had the name in blank. That was even more strange.

Went to the main library and found out that somehow a large number of files had the name in blank. Probably a 15-20% of the files had the problem (There are 192.000+ songs in the library). Only the "name" field was blank... all the other fields of the file seemed to be OK. Not all the files were in the same HD nor I coud at first sight find a common pattern on them.

I restored my latest backup (I try to backup every day) and everything was fine again... not a big deal. I probably have only lost some "last played" info and some of the lyrics added with Kings' plug-in during the day.

I don't recall having done any special thing other than creating a smartlist to show the files with no cover art (obviously not related to the problem) and playing the music as usual.

Probably the library got somehow corrupt. Don't know if a library corruption could cause just wipping out the tittle of some songs, though.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know what happened "just for the record", in case this happens again to anybody.

I would also like to recommend everyone to BACKUP your library as often as possible. This has saved me a lot of trouble in this issue.

Thanks for your time.

[Alex B]

Perhaps only one of the ".jmd" files corrupted for some reason.

I have a habit to click "Backup Library" every time I have made changes. From time to time I delete the excess backup files. I would like to have a Toolbar button for the library backup.

[park]

I have also had this problem, and i have seen this reported in one of the build posts as a bug by somebody else too.

[Deivit]

Perhaps only one of the ".jmd" files corrupted for some reason.

I have a habit to click "Backup Library" every time I have made changes. From time to time I delete the excess backup files. I would like to have a Toolbar button for the library backup.

Yes, I do that too. The toolbar button would be helpful. Also an option (checkbox) to automatically backup library at exit would be great, in my opinion.

[Alex B]

As a test, I replaced the "field (name).jmd" file with an empty file. That emptied all "Name" fields in the MC library. If you have checked your HD and found no problems I guess that something must have interrupted MC when it was writing that file. A system crash?

[Deivit]

It had crashed the night before when using Kings' Lyrics finder plug-in. I had to kill MC via Task Manager. The backup was made deffinitely before that event... what I cannot tell is whether the problem started just when I dettected it or was there during the day and I did not realized it until a "song with no name" began to play.

Thanks for your interest, Alex.

[KingSparta]

It had crashed the night before when using Kings' Lyrics finder plug-in.

I have not seen a crash yet in that program, was it my program that crashed? if so did it give an error?

[KingSparta]

a update from tags may have helped him

never seen fields become blank happen

[Deivit]

I have not seen a crash yet in that program, was it my program that crashed? if so did it give an error?

Hi King,

The program froze in the middle of a lyrics download and ended responding. No, it did not give any error message. Perhaps I should have waited longer but since task manager indicated that Media Center was not responding I decided to kill it.

Anyway, that happened the previous night, so I don't know whether or not both things are indeed related. I was just responding to Alex question who suggested that perhaps a system crash could have damaged the library.

----
Listening to: 'The Inner City Song' from 'The Sound of Irish Folk' by 'Jollybeggarmen' on Media Center 11

[Deivit]

a update from tags may have helped him

never seen fields become blank happen

That's the first solution that came into my mind but due to the size of the library I did not like very much having to make an update tags to such a huge number of files. That's why I decided to restore my last backup. I'm happy I backup the library on a daily basis.

[Alex B]

What I do not understand is if as Alex said "replaced the "field (name).jmd" file with an empty file" yeilds this result, why doesn't MC pick up the names once again from the Tags? Certainly they are not corrupted by the database file   ?

The new database consists of several .jmd files. What I did was to willingly corrupt it. I closed MC, opened the "field (name).jmd" file with Notepad and removed the contents. Next time when MC was started the "Name" field was empty.

Of course, that didn't affect the physical tags in the media files. Update from file tags would probably have restored the field contents, but not all file types can store tags and what tags get stored is also configurable. Besides, Deivit has 192000+ files, so that would have been a longish task.

EDIT

As Deivit said.