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[boliver]

I converted some .ape albums from various compression values to "Very High" in order to save a little space.  The albums were .ape files with .cue files.

The next thing I knew the albums were all corrupted and the conversion window was giving me errors.  The .ape files were all very small now (like a couple hundred K instead of 300 Megs etc.)

[benn600]

I personally don't use the cue files and find that horribly complex.  Plus, it might get confused converting them.

Also, I'm assuming you told MC to overwrite the old files and send them to the trash?  I personally love the MC feature in conversion that lets you convert files and put them in a completely separate folder but not touch the convert-from files or update the MC database with the new files.  It's great because it lets you be very careful when doing a conversion.

Anytime you make data changes like that, similar to Partition Magic, you should always be aware that things can go wrong so you better make sure you have a backup.  I hear problems like yours quite often--people convert lossless audio and then end up with problems in their audio files.  I'm not sure what can happen but I know all this stuff's complicated.

Imagine MC taking track #1 and converting it to a file.  Then, it converts track 2 and overwrites its previous file.  It could get confusing--even for me!  And it would be appending audio to an existing ape file--which could be tough.  What if you converted them out of order?  Even more confusing because it would have to insert data in the middle of the file!

Yikes!

It's not worth the extra confusion for what seems like no gain.  Cue files cause tons of problems as I've seen over the months from other users.

[hit_ny]

I don't use ape, but going from the description, way i would do it just convert the big APE file. move the older one aside and then rename the new to the old filename.

Done.

You could automate the encoding process, so you could designate a folder for all the new files but i think you would need to put them back manually. I suppose rename from properties might be able to help here, maybe some one else can comment.

The cue files would be as is, since the track times have not changed and would work as if nothing happened.

Cue files take a bit of experience to understand, i've been bitten in the past. But since i use them with mp3s there is no other option but to learn how to deal with it.

The biggest gain with cue in MC 12 has been the ability to move their directories anywhere in tree with a simple drag and drop and the new location is automatically updated whereas in the past it was not as simple.

[Higginz]

I converted some .ape albums from various compression values to "Very High" in order to save a little space.  The albums were .ape files with .cue files.
The next thing I knew the albums were all corrupted and the conversion window was giving me errors.  The .ape files were all very small now (like a couple hundred K instead of 300 Megs etc.)

Not sure I fully understand. What you're saying is that you already had ape + que albums on your computer. Then you converted those ape files... to ape + que (but this time with a higher compression). And now when trying to play these - it don't work?. Or can you play them, but not convert them?.

Then you say that the converted files came out very small (a couple of hundred K) supposed to 300 MB.
Do you mean like 200kb files?.  Or do you mean that the audio quality came out as ~256kbps (like mp3 256)?.

[boliver]

Higgenz, you have it right:  converted files and now they don't play and are an order of magnitude smaller than they used to be...

[Alex B]

I think I can reproduce what happened. Probably you selected the cue track files inside MC and converted them using the following options:

Encoding: Monkey's Audio (APE), Extra High
Converter:
- Move To Location: Disabled
- Update database: Enabled
- Send original file to the recycle bin: Enabled
- Skip conversions of same file type: Disabled

This will indeed destroy the files. If you have a lot of free disk space you may be lucky and you can find the big APE files in the recycle bin, othwerwise I hope you have backup copies somewhere.

The track file conversion is intended for creating separate individual track files from the big master files. It is not intended for changing the compression format of the big ape file. You should have loaded the big master ape files to Playing Now and converted them instead of the track files.

You specific settings combination caused the following to happen:
- MC converted the first track of the first album. It created a small track file using the original name of the big APE file and deleted the original file.
- MC started to convert the second file. It tried to use the already created small "track 1" file because the filename didn't change. Naturally this couldn't work properly and an error situation developed. From this point forward MC couldn't anymore start converting the following tracks and it rapidly skipped to the first track of the next album.
- Because you didn't cancel the conversion MC went trough all albums and displayed an error message after the process was finished.

[boliver]

Yes.  That is EXACTLY correct.

But shouldn't Mediacenter understand a little bit about cue files so as not to do this?  (!!!)  When it finds a cue file designated track, it should assume the user wants to convert the original .ape file (what else could he possibly want to do?).

I used to trust Mediacenter not to do bad stuff like this.

[Alex B]

But shouldn't Mediacenter understand a little bit about cue files so as not to do this?  (!!!)
...
I used to trust Mediacenter not to do bad stuff like this.

Usually Media Center prevents things like this from happening. Unfortunately this seems to be a situation that no one has stumbled on before.

I hope the developers can add a file delete prevention if the source file is needed for the other files in the conversion list too. Perhaps it would be better to not allow deletion of a referenced source file at all. Someone may accidentally add only some of the album tracks in the conversion list. This would leave the other album tracks orphaned if MC deleted the source file after a successful conversion.

... When it finds a cue file designated track, it should assume the user wants to convert the original .ape file (what else could he possibly want to do?). ...

Usually users want to split the big files to separate track files and often also change the file format (e.g. from APE to MP3). Normally users also want to preserve the original files so they don't use the "Send original file to the recycle bin" option.

Previously the cue track conversion option was next to useless because the resulting track files were not tagged. This was fixed recently and now MC adds track specific tags to the converted files.

MC still lacks a filename templete option for the converted files. The current system is to use the filename of the source file and add a sequence number. However, because MC can easily rename files from the tags this is not a big problem.

[Higginz]

Yes. an automated file name correction when converting .ape+que to splitted mp3's would be brilliant.
However, It's quite easy as it is now to rename files using the "Rename files from properties" option.
But It's an un-nessesairy extra step you always have to go through.

[hit_ny]

Normally users also want to preserve the original files so they don't use the "Send original file to the recycle bin" option.

Making the default *unchecked* for this setting might be a good step in that direction. The option is there but only required in the minority of cases.

Additionally it could pop up a warning dialog saying original will be deleted with the extra check of 'dont show this again'.