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[Ziba]

Hi,

Ever since I reinstalled MC a few weeks ago, I've been experiencing a very frustrating issue when adding new albums to my library: some songs get corrupted with snippets from other songs in my library. In other words, when I listen to a newly added album, maybe 3 songs out of 10 will have very briefs 1-2 second segments of recently added songs from other albums mixed in.  I'll be listening to a laid-back jazz track which will suddenly incorporate a 2 second snippet of a metal track...

This is driving me crazy! I can't figure out what is causing this. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Ziba]

Additional information: The files themselves seem to be corrupted. For example, I opened a problematic flac file in Foobar and it now has the same glitch when played. The original flac file had no issue at all. Very strange.

[blgentry]

I've never heard of this happening before.  I don't think it's related to MC at all.  You might have a failing disk drive or something like that.  Hard to say.  Sounds like a terrible problem.  I sympathize. 

Brian.

[Ziba]

I've never heard of this happening before.  I don't think it's related to MC at all.  You might have a failing disk drive or something like that.  Hard to say.  Sounds like a terrible problem.  I sympathize. 

Brian.

It is really is terrible!

I'm not sure that it's a hard drive issue, because the files are ok at first. They only get corrupted once I drop them in MC. I have around 2000 albums, but the other song segments that get mixed all come from the last 10 recently added albums or so. That's why I tend to believe it's a (very peculiar) MC related issue, but I might be wrong. I never had that issue before reinstalling MC.

[ferday]

MC is a database that works with existing objects (files) and doesn't write audio data to disk.  the exception is of course, format conversion.  have you converted flac to mp3, or anything like that?

it's possible you are modifying the files with MC (tags or RMC) which is triggering the bad write on the drive, which makes it seem like MC is involved more than it really is.  i'll bet if you just copypasta some files the same thing will happen.

in the interest of solving the problem please try some drive diagnosis (chkdsk, SMART, etc).  this really sounds like a classic corruption problem.

[Ziba]

in the interest of solving the problem please try some drive diagnosis (chkdsk, SMART, etc).  this really sounds like a classic corruption problem.

I tried running a chkdsk on the drive. I only got to 25% done after 12 hours and I had to stop it unfortunately. I'll back up the drive and try again when I know I can leave it running. I'll report back. Thanks for the help.

[~OHM~]

I tried running a chkdsk on the drive. I only got to 25% done after 12 hours and I had to stop it unfortunately. I'll back up the drive and try again when I know I can leave it running. I'll report back. Thanks for the help.

sorry to say if it's taking that long it's toast

[jmone]

I'm sorry to say but it is not good news.  I had the same issues ages ago, where a HDD started to fail in a raid array and chkdsk just made it worse.  All the sectors became jumbled.  I even had bits of video in audio and vice versa.  In the end I had to re-rip 100's of discs .  I hope you have a backup.

[Ziba]

Just wanted to let people know of what I did (sorry for the late reply).

I backed up the drive and formatted it. Then, I ran a chkdsk, but contrary to what I expected, everything seemed to be fine  ? So I copied everything back to the drive, removed the last 10-12 albums which were problematic and added them back again from the original files. Everything seems to be working fine so far, and it's been a month.

I'm a little puzzled, but I'm pretty happy everything seems to be functioning properly. I just hope I haven't jinxed it now...

Thanks to everyone for your input.

[RoderickGI]

I would still be cautious of that drive, and check its SMART attributes to see if it is on the way out.

I use and recommend Hard Disk Sentinel to monitor drives, as it will predict a failure before it happens, and makes it easy to see bad SMART attributes.

It is pretty common that a failing drive, with sectors going bad, will seem to come good via a reformat, because the bad sectors are blocked during the reformat. But if the read heads have been hitting the disk surface there will be particles floating around, and they will cause more problems in future. That is one reason why a hard disk failure can seem to be minor issues, until all of a sudden you get accelerating problems and then catastrophic failure.

Check your drive again. By the way, your back may also have corrupt files, as did mine when I had a failure. I kept finding corrupted image files for some time that neither Chkdsk or other utilities found during the actual failure, backup and recovery process.