Print

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

[fyusmal]

Hi guys.

I am new to MC on MAC and was looking for an alternative to handling flac, ape, wv, dsd natively. Conversion to iTunes was getting cumbersome and tiresome. Found MC20 and it looked promising especially with the Retina mode until the following happened all the while in Retina mode:

1. Imported "sync folder" completed
2. Messing about with pane view to clear missing artwork / disjointed albums
3. MC20 starts to lag and slows down while scrolling
4. Suddenly all logged in services on the MAC gets logged out, Google chrome crashes and all personal preferences / personal files on local folder goes missing / rendered inaccessible.

This scenario has happened 3 times in 2 days and I am going through my third restore.

The 2nd restore was to a date prior to installing MC20 and the system was stable at this point. Reinstalling and using MC20 resulted in the above scenario for the 3rd time. I have spoken to apple about this as I run a 2 month old iMac retina and it seems unlikely to be hardware because the core OS remains intact. Only personal prefs and files are totally wipes out or inaccessible. This seems like an unlikely scenario that something so catastrophic can be cauased by MC20, but by process of elimination after 3 restores, there seems to be no other cause. The iMac has been extremely stable otherwise.

Any comments? I would love to purchase MC as my main media manger as iTunes suck for large libraries consisting of multiple file formats and I am moving on to DSD. Any ideas? Has anyone else has this problems?

[JohnT]

Can you describe how you imported your media?

[fyusmal]

Hi,

Configure Auto import selected to sync to a folder located on an external HDD.

Write file tags option deselected.

Crash happens after album artwork search is complete and the MC is laggy in scrolling through panes album view in retina mode. 3 times, in exactly the same manner.

[fyusmal]

After the 3rd restore, once the system is stable, I ran MC with these settings:

1. default settings on Audio options
2. Auto import of music folder
3. Retina mode is OFF

After 1 hour the system was again wiped of all user profile preferences / associated files to the profile.

Now going through my 4th restore. I am baffled by that auto import could possibly cause catastrophic data loss.

Any ideas? I am about to give up using MC altogether for now until it is stable on iMac. Mine is the late 2014 27in Retina model with 32GB RAM.

[JohnT]

After the 3rd restore, once the system is stable, I ran MC with these settings:

1. default settings on Audio options
2. Auto import of music folder
3. Retina mode is OFF

After 1 hour the system was again wiped of all user profile preferences / associated files to the profile.

Now going through my 4th restore. I am baffled by that auto import could possibly cause catastrophic data loss.

Any ideas? I am about to give up using MC altogether for now until it is stable on iMac. Mine is the late 2014 27in Retina model with 32GB RAM.

I'm trying hard to replicate this problem but so far no luck.  Could you post a screenshot of your auto-import setup dialog?  Here's mine:

[JohnT]

Also, please send me a log file:
 
1. Help / Logging / Enable logging
2. Run the import.
3. After it crashes, restart Media Center and go to Help / Logging / Report problem. 

Also send me the Mac crash report. 

Thanks.

[fyusmal]

I would like to help send the crash report but unfortunately, the crash results in the following:

1. Loss of personal preferences / settings / keychains / bookmarks etc.
2. Loss of all data and files associated with the profile on the local drive.

Essentially the OS turns into a brand new install on a computer that has been wiped clean. This includes any possible crash reports that is generated. It all just goes missing. Either deleted or inaccessible due to a profile wipe.

I have tested MC on a 2013 macbook air with auto import and retina mode and was not able to replicate the problem either. It seems to only happen on the new iMac.

I have reinstated the OS again and now running MC with manual import. Error logging has also been turned on. I will keep you posted. My previous auto-import setting were exactly the same as the screen cap you posted.

[leezer3]

This smells of a corrupt media file/ file handling bug being at the root cause to me, and triggering some sort of overflow (??).
I've got no idea how this could go to the extent of wiping your user profile, but running the auto import and getting to generating cover art, slowing down and then crashing screams that it's hit a file it doesn't like.

Thus, MC attempts to parse said file, and everything falls over.
Try copying your entire media collection to the laptop and try the same steps to reproduce.

If that then throws the same wobbly, the best I can suggest is to try importing smaller chunks of media until you can find the culprit file(s).

-Leezer-

[JohnT]

I have tested MC on a 2013 macbook air with auto import and retina mode and was not able to replicate the problem either. It seems to only happen on the new iMac.

Did you auto-import the same files from the same external HDD on this other machine?  Is there anything that you can think of that might be unusual about the files on the external HDD?  Is it solely used for media files?  Approximately how many files and what types of formats?
How much disk space is on your primary drive where Media Center is installed?

[BartMan01]

I would suggest you use that tool that will severely stress test that machine - not sure of a good one off the top of my head for OSX.  I would be very surprised if this is really an MC issue, it feels more like a hardware issue that MC is doing something to trigger.  

Edit - this might help:
http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2013/05/how-to-stress-test-your-mac-cpu-ram-and-disk.html

[fyusmal]

Hi,

1. When testing on macbook air, the exact same files were duplicated on a NAS. The macbook air was then set to auto import to the files on the NAS. The iMac media files are on a USB connected external HDD containing multiple media types. In both cases, the folder imported contains only music in FLAC, Wave, Wv, APE and ALAC files only. I have encountered some cue sheets with parsing errors but it seems too minor to be the cause of a stack overflow of anything destructive. There are also some files in odd ASCII characters representing Korean or Chinese characters. A point to note is that the destructive crash happens not while importing on initial auto-import but after the import is complete and the cover art has been generated and MC is under regular use. Regular here meaning using it for playback and library management tasks. Does the file saving process to tags happen concurrently during auto-import or after import?

2. There are about 50000  tracks in the library. NAS has 4TB available memory. External USB HDD has 3.5TB available memory. iMac has 32GB RAM. macbook air has 16GB RAM.

3. The iMac is now running MC on manual single folder import on the iMac. It has been a few days and it seems stable enough to not cause the profile wipe / data loss. However, I am getting on average about 5 crashes per day, ie MC just deciding to suddenly quit. I have activated the error logging and will send over soon.

4. Conclusions: It is unlikely hardware reasons. MC now runs relatively "stable" on iMac with auto-import turned off. It is also unlikely a corrupt file in the imported folder as the same set of files were tested on the macbook air without any crashes. The only probably conclusion is where the files are stored. Is it possible that the USB external HDD accessing time lag / delay etc could cause MC to crash catastrophically when pushed too hard? In the present "stable" mode and I use that term loosely because I do not think any application is supposed to crash this frequently on any system, I get an unexpected quit when doing complex tasks, like tagging multiple files, or tagging while a large batch of tags are being saved, creating complex custom smartlists or at times simply by scrolling too quick when MC is saving file tags.

So the next question is, how can these issues be resolved? Will sending error reporting at every instance assist in solving these issues?

Link is the first error log:    http://faiserver.synology.me:5000/fbsharing/zP6njQwG

[BartMan01]

4. Conclusions: It is unlikely hardware reasons.

I am not sure how you can definitively say that without running stress tests on your hardware.  The fact that in some cases the crash results in a loss of your user profile at the OS level makes me really think you have an underlying hardware problem, I really don't see how MC (or any other program in OSX) could be causing that to happen.

[leezer3]

Hi,

1. When testing on macbook air, the exact same files were duplicated on a NAS. The macbook air was then set to auto import to the files on the NAS. The iMac media files are on a USB connected external HDD containing multiple media types. In both cases, the folder imported contains only music in FLAC, Wave, Wv, APE and ALAC files only. I have encountered some cue sheets with parsing errors but it seems too minor to be the cause of a stack overflow of anything destructive. There are also some files in odd ASCII characters representing Korean or Chinese characters. A point to note is that the destructive crash happens not while importing on initial auto-import but after the import is complete and the cover art has been generated and MC is under regular use. Regular here meaning using it for playback and library management tasks. Does the file saving process to tags happen concurrently during auto-import or after import?

A copy of the files on a NAS is not the same
Filesystems work by providing 'pointers' to a block of data on the underlying disk, and any given file is made up of 100s of these little blocks. Now if one of these blocks gets corrupted, 99% of the time, the effect is too small to notice, or for that matter the system corrects itself automatically.

Either a vanilla copy of the files, or copying the files from the USB drive to the NAS will create an entirely new set of these 'pointers'.
The 'pointers' in your original files can in theory point *anywhere*, and it's conceivable if unlikely that MC attempting to access the data could cause the symptons you're seeing.

See if you can reproduce the issue on the laptop using the USB drive as a starting point.
I'd also try running Disk Utility over both the internal and external drives:
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203176

-Leezer-

[fyusmal]

Bartman01: No I am not sure. Perhaps I should be extremely concise about my sentence construction here with caveat included. Based on my limited testing it is my layman opinion to come to the conclusion that I highly doubt that it is a hardware issue. Nevertheless I will be doing the stress test and reporting results here if that would eliminate one possible cause. The fact is on auto import mode causes systems crash at every instance, not some. It is just a matter of time. That being said I agree that it is unlikely any program can cause an OS level crash. It was the same thing i mentioned to apple tech.

Leezer: Thank you, your explanation makes a lot of sense. I will try to test it in such manner when I can free up the external HDD as it is the primary data drive. And I will run a test as a HDD is prone to errors.

[glynor]

Now if one of these blocks gets corrupted, 99% of the time, the effect is too small to notice, or for that matter the system corrects itself automatically.

This is not technically true with most filesystems in common use (certainly those on the Mac).

HFS+ and NTFS both are journaling filesystems.  This means changes to the filesystem metadata are journaled and can be rolled back.  Metadata, in this case, means names of the files, modification dates, where those blocks are stored on disk, directory structures, modification dates, and things like that.  If any of that gets damaged, or only partially applied (in the case of a sudden power loss), then the filesystem can "reverse" the metadata to a previous known good state.

However, journaling does not protect the contents of the files themselves in any way.  So, in your example, if a block gets corrupted, the filesystem does not know, and cannot recover from the error.  As far as the metadata is concerned, the block is still there, but it just no longer contains the same data.  The filesystem doesn't know, or care, what is inside those blocks.  It only knows and remembers where it put them, and what they were called by the human at the controls.

Newer filesystems do protect the data on disk from corruption.  There are a few ways to do this, but one of the most promising is probably the method used by btrfs.

None of that helps you, in any way, but it was worth pointing out the difference.  HFS+ does not protect your files.  At all.  It protects itself, but the files are left to the whims of the disk drive (which are very good at their jobs, but can fail).  HFS+ in particular, is pretty darn terrible at protecting even the filesystem metadata.

More for the curious:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/

Also, for the record, I agree with Bartman01, so long as what you are describing is actually what is happening, then there is no way I can possibly see that MC could be causing the problem.  It sounds, to me, very much like a filesystem problem.

You need to run Disk Utility on your system drive, and on whatever drive you use for your media (the system drive is the more likely culprit).  Your filesystem is probably in bad, bad shape (or, possibly, the disk underneath):
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Disks

[fyusmal]

Thanks for the feedback, suggestions and education.

I have done a quick disk utility check of the system drive (internal SSD) and the external media drive (USB HDD sitting on a dual drive bay)

According to disk utility all is well. Seems there are limited choices for diagnostics on a Mac so I will have to look around for a bit for something that can give me deeper check on the drives.

[glynor]

They're not really limited at all.  The OSX Disk Utility is based on fsck, which is a powerful Unix command that fixes the filesystem.  As I said, though, the Filesystem is only part of the equation, and that tells you nothing about the underlying data, or disk.  If you take a badly failing disk, and freshly format it, and then run Disk Utility on it, it'll show up clean then too.  You won't see issues until the disk tries to use the blocks that have actually gone bad.

It is possible that something else is crashing badly and then some process is writing nonsense all over your disk, but I'm skeptical that it is MC doing it without more evidence.  It is much more likely, I agree with Bartman, that it is a hardware issue.

The recovery mode for your computer should have an automated hardware test.  This would be a good place to start:
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202731

That should test all of the components.  Because the problem could be in the Graphics card, for example.  Any driver or hardware problem that makes the computer crash, if the computer crashes at the wrong moment with the filesystem in flight, bad things can certainly happen to HFS+ which could manifest as a borked disk.  So, if you've reformatted or "fixed" it, and then scan with the Disk Utility, then it won't find anything wrong, until next time it happens.  If you're using an esoteric third-party DAC for audio playback, that could be another possible culprit.

In general, though, the memory processes on OSX are isolated, and MC cannot make Chrome crash.  That, to me, is the biggest sign that your computer is having other, more general, problems.  MC could, if it wanted to (though it wouldn't), write nonsense all over your boot drive.  But, it can't touch the memory of a running Chrome process and make it crash.  It isn't allowed to do that.  Drivers can, MC can't.

The cause could be failing hardware, a bad disk, or just existing filesystem problems.  It could also, conceivably, be MC, but that probably points more to a driver issue (causing an ill-timed crash) than MC itself writing all over your disk.  Even so, we need to rule out hardware issues first.  The automated Apple Diagnostics package is a good place to start.

[BartMan01]

According to disk utility all is well. Seems there are limited choices for diagnostics on a Mac so I will have to look around for a bit for something that can give me deeper check on the drives.

In addition to the built in tools, I personally like DiskTools Pro.  I really prefer SpinRite for drive validation, but using that on the Mac (until the next version finally comes out) is tricky.

I would suspect either a failing drive or a memory problem, so I would start testing those first.

If you have an apple store nearby, take it in and let them run their tools on it.

[silentshade]

Hello.
Seems that similar issue is discussed here http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=94334.0 and my post here: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=96598.0