fingers Wrote: > Sometimes the files change size after the rescan. Sometimes some of the > tag information is missing after the rescan.
This might sound like a silly question, but please bear with me: how do you know the files change size? Did you note the size of each file on your hard drive before the scan, or are you comparing against your backup copies after you find they've been corrupted? (If it's the latter, then it still might be the case that the files are corrupted before the scan too. But in that case I'd be surprised that mp3 files never get corrupted, unless you have many more wmas than mp3s and the corruption rate is low.) > By the way... is there a better wan to edit .wma tags other than > Windows Media Player? These days, I use MediaMonkey (www.mediamonkey.com), though it only supports a small (but reasonable) fixed set of tags. DBPowerAMP (no URL to hand, sorry) covers a wider range of wierd and wonderful WMA tags, and was the only tag editor that let me work around a problem with SS and the WM/URL tag. However, by the time my free use period of the extended tag set editor expired, the bug in SS was fixed, so I didn't need it any more :-). For what it's worth, nowadays I use Exact Audio Copy to rip to FLAC, and then use MediaMonkey to convert this to WMA for my portable. (I also use MM to fix any tags I forgot to fix in EAC.) > I copy both .wma and mp3 files. This problem is only with .wma files. > When replacing corrupted .wma files on the SS machine, I copy over my > LAN from the computer sitting next to the SS computer to it. This seems to rule out some low-level copying problem, unless - to be pedantic - mp3s are being corrupted too, but never to the point where they're broken (but this seems unlikely). Yet Dan says that the scan shouldn't be modifying your files. I'm mystified! bpa's suggestion of using Filemon might be worth a try (I've not used it though), especially if it can tell which app has modified a file. However, if the corruption is random then you'll probably need to watch and scan a large number of files, which (as bpa says) might generate tons of data. (And turning on logging or monitoring is often a good way to make problems disappear :-)) > At this moment I am listening through SS some files that I just copyied > back to the SS machine from the backup machine because after my most > recent scan some of these album files (.wma) became corrupted. I have > not rescanned since copying the files to SS and they are playing just > fine. If corruption is happening randomly, then this doesn't say much (so sorry I asked about it!) If any of these files that you listened to pre-scan were to appear corrupted post-scan, then that would strongly suggest that the rescan is causing the corruption. What might be interesting - but tangential - is that if you're loading these files into the playlist by anything other than Browse Music Folder, then SS isn't updating its DB; and this implies that SS's DB is consistent with the uncorrupted versions of the files (and that *suggests* that the file became corrupted after SS extracted its DB info from it). On the other hand, if you're using Browse Music Folder, then SS *is* updating its DB, and that wouldn't say much (well, except that whatever Browse Music Folder is doing isn't corrupting the files (at least, not this time!)) > SS doesn't say anything about the files, it just skips over them if > corrupted. It may play a bit of each but just skips over. Windows > Media Player on the other hand does indeed state that WMP cannot play > the file because it is corrupted. I don't know for sure, but SS seems to believe whatever is in its DB, and will start trying to play a file until something goes wrong (which might be at the start, of course). I got truncated-play behaviour when I replaced 96kbps files with 160kbps files and didn't bother to rescan. WMP is probably analysing the whole file (well, maybe just doing some kind of checksum test). Does WMP complain about the file when you load it into its playlist, or only when you actually try to play it? If its the former, then a quick way to find corrupted files would be to load them all into WMP's playlist; so doing this before a SS rescan might answer once and for all my question about whether files are being randomly corrupted before the scan. But then, building such a playlist might not be so quick :-(. I sometimes use WMP to check consistency of playlists, because missing files (misspelled or moved) in playlists look really obvious in WMP - it doesn't replace the filename with the tag info. Sigh. I'm running out of things to suggest you try, or possible causes. (Clutching at straws now: funny character sets in tags?) Maybe this should be submitted as a separate bug report so the real engineers will give it some attention. (It's not obvious to me that it's the same problem as the other reports mentioned here.) It would be so easy just to say, stop using WMA! But if you're anything like me... I'd love to drop WMA (at least from my SS's library), but I have a huge number of WMA files (legacy from my portable-only days) that will take months to re-rip; and quite a few where that isn't an option. -- Brian -- Brian Ritchie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Brian Ritchie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2319 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=25739 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
