Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mitch Sowden]

Hi All,
I have predominantly lossless format (FLAC & Ape) in my >2TB media collection. (Audio only) I find that after a new install and without recovering a backed up library – importing and analysing again from scratch – MC seems to “hang” during the import function – particularly during the analyse audio part but before that as well occasionally.

I suspect that this is due to corruption or other file level issues and surprisingly for the many years I have been living with digital media, surprisingly few. From searching here at Interact I have sourced some external tools for audio analysis (many folk warning against running or relying on some of these due to questionable results etc)

Before I use any external tools, I’d like to better understand what MC does with bad files and importantly how I identify (using MC) what files are a problem. I have been given a clue from the past where I recall messages similar to “Skipped files previously determined bad” or something similar so I think MC is well aware of problem files and has some functionality / help in weeding out the rot… I am sure that the answer is in the terrifying power of smartlists from what I have read but I am very aware of the power of smartlists and terrified of making a mistake.

If I ever seriously screw my audio files up properly I’ll probably throw in the tile and revert to streaming audio down the wet piece of string I call an internet connection here.

Can someone please list the idiot’s guide to the high level reading subjects (links very welcome) to understand the MC approach to the management of bad files. Specifically how to identify, treat (if possible) and remove… After that I’ll tackle the other bane / Holy Grail of my life – duplicate or suspected duplicates…

Kind Regards,

Mitch

[Matt]

Can you find what file causes the analyze to hang and provide a sample to matt at jriver dot com (an email)?

Thanks.

[Mitch Sowden]

Hi Matt,

With pleasure but that's half my problem and purpose of this post. I am sure this is not a MC problem but a file problem but I don't know how to identify the problem children. My work around (if it is) is to kill MC in task manager and repeatedly run import. Every time MC reports a differing number of files remaining (gets lower) until eventually everyone is happy and then by and large auto import works fine. My problem is only now at the start of the process of importing a large "raw" media directory because I (stupidly I now know thanks to previous support) didn't back up my library.

If you want to tell me how to find the culprit, I'd be glad to try but I re-enforce that my opinion is that this is a file problem not a MC product issue. Equally, I'm not even after examining files - At this stage I'm after understanding and what approach I should take. I believe that from understanding, when I have specific problems with specific files I'll be able to get to the detail at that stage. I fully accept that data corruption is part of managing large media directories and just want to understand at a high level how I should be thinking and approach this correctly - at least from a JRiver perspective.

Thanks for your prompt response - Cheers, Mitch

[Matt]

Well you should be able to pick all the files and manually run an Analyze Audio.  Then it'll stall on one of the files and we'll have it.

[Mitch Sowden]

Oh Ok Matt. So reboot, don't try to re-import but run analyse audio and wait for it to fail to identify? i.e the problem child is already imported into MC. I kind of assumed that because of the failure it (problem file) was still "outside" MC... Glad you still have patience with idiots... I'll do so once this electrical storm passes... Mitch