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[jimmy neutron]

Hi guys. Just thought I'd post this issue I've been having as of late in that it can help other's who are pulling their hair trying to figure this out.

I have about 1 full terrabyte of music in various formats on my external drive. Thse formats are FLAC from 16/44 all the way up to 24/192, a few mp3's, some OGG's, a very few WMA, and possibly some WAV's too. Most all of my music is purchased and is ripped from CD, DVD, or downloaded from places like HD Tracks. I do have some *cough*torrents*cough*.  And their in lies the problem.

MC's internal codecs can handle most any audio file today and when it imports the folder is "sees" each and every file. Importing has NEVER been an issue for me because MC has always imported ALL my music on the first try with no issues. All of a sudden last week when I added some torrented downloads (this is why we should NEVER download music illegally, and believe me - lesson learned. I won't be doing it anymore), MC began to crash on me during import. After about 3/4 of the way in I would get the "MC has stopped responding" box, then it would shut down. If I went in to the import library and removed the folders from the library then MC behaves as normal and I can continue to use it with the files it was able to import (though not the rest as it hung at 3/4). At first I thought it was MC as it upgraded to a newer version. I uninstalled, installed, removed library, added library - all to no avail. I have all my music backed up onto another external hard drive, and I loaded my music from that drive thinking maybe my main drive was going faulty - same problem. At this point I knew it was something in my music folders that was causing MC to lock up on importing.

When you download a torrent you never really know what you are getting. There may be other malicious files in there. Apparently that's what happened. I have not gone into my music folders manually to find the problem (yet!), but I will have to at soe point. The solution is pretty simple and should be done anyway. Most people, I assume, will not configure the importer and just let MC import EVERYTHING. And that's what my MC was doing. It was importing all files, including some that were causing MC to hang. So what I did was go into the importer settings and told MC to import ONLY the file types that I know are in the drive and are music files - FLAC, mp3, etc. The rest of the file type I unchecked so that MC would pass over them. In other words, I told MC to ONLY look for, and import, these files only. And it worked!! I now have MC importing and playing back all my music the way it should.

So be sure to check off only the files that you want MC to import, and not let it import everything. This could save you many days of headaches.

Jimmy

[Matt]

If you ever find a file that cause a problem during import, please mail a copy to matt at jriver dot com.

Thanks.

[JimH]

I saw something at Computeraudiophile.com this morning that seemed wrong.  I wonder if it could be related.

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/457-guide-converting-itunes-dedicated-music-server/

Paul Raulerson said:

"... when I converted a bunch of ALAC files to zero compression FLAC files a few months back, using dbPowerAmp, the created FLAC files had an incorrect bit rate that caused them to sound just purely awful. Compressed FLAC files worked okay.

"XLD converted FALC files with zero compression were created with the correct bit rate and played just fine. "

[jimmy neutron]

I have a quite a few files where I used dbPoweramp to convert from ALAC to FLAC. I have also used DVDconverter to rip the hi-rez audio from my DVD-audio discs. These files I know are correct as I had them in my library before. The same with my ALAC conversions. I'm thinking it was in some recent music that I downloaded. FLAC and some 320k mp3's. When you download torrents, as long as you're careful and check the folder before importing it, you should be good. But somewhere in one of those folders is a file causing the hangup. I checked all folders after the download is complete and I don't recall seeing anything obviously wrong. But this week I'll go thru them manually to see if I can find that one bad file. It should'nt be too hard since it's just a few albums.

Jimmy