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[jcarlso5]

Media Center deleted all of the files in my library (music, images etc) from my hard drive yesterday. Everything else on my machine is untouched. Needless to say, I'm a little frustrated. Here's how it went down:

I started Media Center 12.0.410, clicked on Audio, selected my entire music library, then went to tools-> advanced tools -> analyze audio. Clicked analyze. I saw that it tool longer to analyze the audio than I had guessed, so I stopped and went back and selected the files from one of my playlists and started to analyze that audio instead. After a few minutes, Media Center started to complain that it couldn't write the information to the tags of the files that it was analyzing. I went to the folder on my hard drive of the song it had just analyzed to check file permissions and saw that my files were disappearing. I went back to Media Center to close it, but by that time, there were so many windows opening reporting errors, that I couldn't close it fast enough. Once my audio library was gone, MC's interface freaked out (replaced all the text on the UI with "playing now") and crashed.

I had to spend $40 on a program to "undelete" my library and was only able to recover part of it. I would really appreciate JRiver doing something to help defray the cost of the software I had to purchase to recover my library. I'm not sure how much I've lost in content, but as an IT professional, I knew that mirrored disks wouldn't protect me from something like this.

Applicable setup information:
Vista Ultimate 64-bit
Media Center 12.0.410 - no plugins, extensions etc.
Intel chip
4GB RAM

Unless something like this happens again, I intend to keep using Media Center--I'll just never analyze audio again.

[Doof]

I hate to say it, but I really don't think MCs to blame for this. I say that because I, and tons of other people on this board are using MC and analyzing audio everyday and so far, you're the only one I've seen that's had this problem. I'm also using MC on Vista 64, 4GB RAM (although an AMD chip) and it's never even hiccupped for me.

My guess is that something else happened and the messages you got from MC were just another symptom of that event. If your storage device had a problem, and files were corrupting or dissappearing, that could easily be the cause for MCs crash, rather than the other way around.

[jcarlso5]

Doof, thanks for your response.

I find it hard to believe that it can be anything other than MC. The drive on which I store my music has 465GB worth of data on it and all of it is fine except for the 78GB worth of files (which MC manages) that were deleted last night. I might agree with your point of disk corruption if it wasn't for the fact that only files were deleted; every single folder within the library remained intact and navigable and neither my raid controller nor Windows has reported any problems.

Can I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that MC did this? No. But I've worked with computers long enough to say it's fairly likely that after performing an action on a select number of files and then later discovering that that exact set of files has been deleted (and nothing else) that the entity to perform that action (MC) is the culprit.

True, there are many other users who have never experienced this problem, but bugs are called bugs because they're often difficult to identify and eliminate, which is why I offered the details of the situation I believe to have caused the problem. Maybe no one has foolishly tried to analyze 16K+ files at once. I don't know.

I don't think I'm asking too much. I'm a paying customer who's already invested $40 into MC and who has now had to invest another $40 to get things more or less back to normal.

Thanks for your time.

[Doof]

I have to agree that it does seem odd that the only files to go missing were the ones that were analyzed by MC. I would think though, that if it were a problem only with MC, that other users would have had this happen to them as well. There may be something specific to your setup that does bring out a previously unseen "dark side" to MC, though.

Out of curiosity, what data retrieval program did you end up buying? I've been looking for a good one, and $40 seems pretty reasonable to me.

[Matt]

I've read your post carefully and reviewed the code that does audio analysis.  I just can't see how MC could erase files.  We haven't heard this before.

Maybe you could make an empty library and put temporary copies of files somewhere and test audio analysis again.  Please report any strangeness.

[rjm]

It is very easy to tell MC to delete all your files. For example, press delete when the root folder of your music is selected in Drives and Devices. There are many other ways. Any chance you were in a hurry and unintentionally initiated a delete operation?

[leezer3]

Sounds to me like something went awry with the 64-bit compatibility.
If he accidentally accidentally chose to delete all the files, this really shouldn't cause a program hang/ interface rat up.

A lot of this is pure speculation, but: He tried to analyze the whole library. This is probably significant Next, he stops analysis and tries to add a file already in the analysis queue for immediate start (I'd guess that he probably didn't clear the analysis queue). Not entirely sure why MC would now freak out, but trying to add a file already in the queue for analysis under the 64 bit environment could be causing an unintended overflow somewhere? Again speculation, but could the fact that the entire library is already in the queue be contributing to causing this?
Anyhow, this sounds like a very specific set of circumstances causing an unexpected response.

-Leezer-

[Shasta Mcnasty]

I don't have a horse in this race, but a good backup policy would have made this a minor inconvenience rather than a major problem.  Data can be lost in lots of ways...human error, hardware failure, even software failure.  You should never never never have just one copy of any data that is important to you. 

USB hard drives are cheap. 

[hit_ny]

A lot of this is pure speculation, but: He tried to analyze the whole library. This is probably significant

Anyone using MC for the first time would do this, the worst that's happened if memory serves me right is MC might crash but no way have i heard it automatically deleting things.

I don't know how to make MC automatically delete anything.

The only thing that i can think of is if you select files in PN or other viewschem , and do a shift+delete. Now if the GUI is unresponsive, its possible these cmds get queued up and fire off when MC is ready. He mentions adding from another playlist, is it possible that a delete key was pressed at anytime.

That too a simple delete key press will just remove from the library only after presenting a dialog with 3 options. There is no way to disable this dialog AFAIK.

Next, he stops analysis and tries to add a file already in the analysis queue for immediate start (I'd guess that he probably didn't clear the analysis queue). Not entirely sure why MC would now freak out, but trying to add a file already in the queue for analysis under the 64 bit environment could be causing an unintended overflow somewhere? Again speculation, but could the fact that the entire library is already in the queue be contributing to causing this?

MC would just ignore files that were already analysed or if there were dupes it would skip the copy once it finished AA on the first.

Anyhow, this sounds like a very specific set of circumstances causing an unexpected response.

64 bit is the prolly the only thing unique here.

Ppl have been using Vista with MC for some time now, nothing unusual reported so far.

[Doof]

MC would just ignore files that were already analysed or if there were dupes it would skip the copy once it finished AA on the first.
64 bit is the prolly the only thing unique here.

Ppl have been using Vista with MC for some time now, nothing unusual reported so far.

And like I said, I'm using MC on Vista 64 myself, and just recently ran AA on over 300 new songs, then had MC sync roughly 3000 songs to a virtual handheld, converting them all to lossless WMA in the process. While it's not exactly what he tried, there's still a lot of file access going on and it all ran perfectly. I'm really having a hard time laying the blame at MC's feet on this one. And I've never been shy at laying blame on MC if it was deserved. I still won't use FLAC because of the less than stellar history that MC's had with FLAC, even if it is fixed now.

And like was said earlier, a good backup solution is key. It always seems that it's the IT pros out there who never practice what they preach, and I definitely include myself in that statement. I lost my entire media library twice.