Hi all,
I've been a big fan of J River Media Center for a long time now.
Recently the hard drive that contains my music library (175 gigs of lossless WMA files) began to spontaneously unmount. Concerned that the drive was failing I went out and purchased a replacement external hard drive (ethernet based). After copying all of my music files over to the new drive, creating a new library, and tagging everything with covers (etc...) I took some songs out for a spin.
Everything sounded great for a few songs when, to my extreme and abject horror, the speakers emitted an unholy screeching noise. If I hadn't been playing the music on my Martin Logan electrostats I think I would have blown out some tweeters. The music returned after 1-2 seconds of this extreme distortion.
I immediately stopped the playback (after dropping a mug I happened to be holding (the mug's OK)). After checking the cabling out I replayed the track at a lower volume and heard the exact same distortion at the same point during the song. I then used Windows Media Player, played back the song in question, and encountered the same distortion as well. Having become concerned that the entire library was bad, I played a wide cross section of tunes for over two hours. During that time I encountered the distortion on about 20% of the tracks I listened to.
I double checked the failing hard drive to find that there was no distortion on the tracks in question.
My initial thought was that the transfer of such a large number of files (about 10,000) created the problem. So I moved the files over again to a different folder on my new hard drive. For this transfer I ran the computer to my router with a direct ethernet cable rather than using the Powerline over Ethernet connection I had been using.
Once, everything had transfered (a five and a half hour process) I created a new library and tagged everything properly. I fired up some music and listened. Again, there was the same type of loud distortion on a large number of music files. Interestingly, some tracks had the exact same distortion at the exact same spot as on my first attempt. Some other tracks, which had exhibited distortion, played clean.
I thought things over and concluded that my old hard drive had been failing and that, for an unknown reason, files were being corrupted during the transfer. Although I don't understand why some, not all, of my music files on the second attempt have the same distortion, at identical points of the song.
I considered my options and decided to take the backup of my music files (made last year onto the C: drive of my main computer) and use those for the new library. So, I took these files (a year out of date) and copied them over to my new external hard drive in yet a third folder. At this point I have not imported them into J River MC or tagged them in any way (other than what tags are there originally). All the tracks I've checked play clean with no distortion.
My question is this: could the act of tagging my files during the intital import into a new library corrupt the WMA files themselves to create this distortion? My personal thought is no, but I would like to ask this to the community at large before I go through the tagging process again.
(As a side note, I don't understand why it takes so long to tag the files in a new library. I have read that the blank tags are being written to as well, but am still unsure why tagging my library should take over three hours. Is there a way to disable the tagging of blank fields?)
If the distortion is not tagging related, then can anyone help figure out what has been happening.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
-David
Author
Topic: Can tagging audio files with MC17 create moments of extreme distortion? (Read 1946 times)