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[wer]

So I just had a strange incident with JRiver MC.  No crashes or anything unusual preceded the incident.  Everything was fine yesterday.  No, I didn't make any changes.  No, I didn't have another computer connect as a library client.

I noticed the sound was funny, so I went in to check DSP studio for my zone.  Lots of the settings were wrong.  15inch subwoofer was turned on, which I never use, ever.  Other settings were wrong.  A few were right.  Very strange, I thought.

Closed MC and rebooted the HTPC. Upon startup, things were just as "wrong" as they were before the reboot.  Ok, I thought, something corrupted my library.

So I did a library restore to the most recent backup, from 10/7.  (The next most recent was 10/4).  Restore went fine.  Checked the DSP Studio settings.  MOST things were as I had left them the other day.  One thing looked like it was different, but I can't be 100% sure I didn't mis-click something, so I let that pass.

Then I went to check my equalizer presets.  The one that was actively selected was fine.  All the others were corrupted:  all the sliders were at +12, for all the other equalizer presets I had created.  And I know they were corrupted, because I took screenshots of them after originally creating them.


Has anyone seen this before?  DSP Studio getting corrupted for no reason, then this nonsense of all your equalizer presets corrupted on a library restore?

Is this a thing?

I can recreate the equalizer presets from a screenshot, but how do I know what else is corrupted or what was restored correctly?

Not happy.

[wer]

As a follow up, I tried loading a couple of earlier library backups, and on all of them, the equalizer presets are corrupted, except for the preset that was active.

This really isn't acceptable.  Made worse by the fact I neglected to screenshot a couple of them, so I don't have a basis to recreate them except memory/ear.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can recover the information (equalizer presets) and more importantly verify the integrity of the rest of the restore and prevent this sort of crap in the future?

[wer]

Final update:

Well, this was a very interesting exercise.

I realized, after trying various Library backups and getting corrupted info from all the ones I tried, that my scheduled Macrium full image backup had just run on Saturday (and as I'd said, everything was fine then).

I restored the entire partition from the Macrium backup, rebooted, and voila, everything was fine with JRiver again.  Everything was exactly as I remembered it should be.

So I tried another experiment.  I then did a library restore from one of those library backups that had restored, but had seemingly contained corrupted equalizer presets (all sliders at +12).  Library restore completed fine as before, and I checked the equalizer presets.  They were all fine.

SO, the net out was that something was corrupted with MC itself, such that the program ran (seemingly without problem and without generating any error messages) but DSP settings were screwed up, but the corruption was so deep that DSP settings could not be properly restored from a Library backup.  That such a thing could happen is troubling.

Obviously, performing the Macrium restore corrected whatever the underlying problem was, and thus revealed the true-good nature of the library backups themselves; it was the restore process that was problematic.

If there exists any sort of integrity check for MC (not just the library, but the executables, data files, and registry as well) that could identify a problem or corruption (similar to SFC for Windows) I'd love to know about it.  Does anyone know of a way of diagnosing this sort of problem? 

Without Macrium I'd have been up a creek.  As is stands now, everything's back to working fine again.  For anyone with whom this strikes a chord, I'd highly recommend Macrium Reflect.  Great program.

[JimH]

SO, the net out was that something was corrupted with MC itself, such that the program ran (seemingly without problem and without generating any error messages) but DSP settings were screwed up, but the corruption was so deep that DSP settings could not be properly restored from a Library backup.

While anything is possible, that's extremely unlikely.  Of all the things that can go wrong on a computer, software corrupting itself is pretty far down the list.

[wer]

Well if you have another hypothesis that would explain the restoration of MC library backups resulting in all equalizer presets showing all sliders at +12, across reboots, lay it on me.  Since I don't know where or how equalizer preset config is stored/processed internally, nor do I have access to the code that loads it from the library backup, I can't fruitfully speculate further.

It was a bizarre experience and I'm glad it's over.

I take it from your response that there's no sort of integrity checker for MC like sfc... Too bad.

[wer]

Maybe I discovered something... Will report back if I can figure it out.