multiple file corruption issue

[mrbenn]

Hi

I've started noticing a lot of glitchy playback over the last couple of days, and at first I put it down to the odd bad rip etc, but its now gotten bad enough I'm worried there is a serious bug in MB. (3.3)

The playback sounds either completely broken, or in some other cases like two tracks have been randomly cut and pasted together.

I've been doing a lot of tag fixing recently, and I've done some pretty large batches, and it appears to be files from large batches that are affected. (tens of thousands of changes, mostly album artist and track number, followed by a "move to organised folder" once I have the tags completed)

I have backups, but I dont know how many files have been affected. I've checked the library drive and its got no issues.

Thanks

[sveakul]

"Glitchy playback" and "file corruption" are two different things.  I don't follow exactly what you're describing, but it sounds like you're saying this issue occurs AFTER you perform tag editing on a batch of files, presumably with MusicBee--is that correct?  Do the glitches happen on ALL of those files, or just some of them?  Are you sure that before you made the changes they played fine?  Afterwards, are the glitches audible on ANY player, or just MusicBee?

One of the last revisions/updates of Windows 10 caused audio issues for many folks that were resolved when they updated to the latest audio drivers provided by their device manufacturer.

What file format are we talking about--mp3, flac, all of them?  What output settings are you using?

I do all my batch tagging outside of MusicBee, but I have used 3.3+ since it was made available and never have had any file playback corruption/glitch issues.

[mrbenn]

Yes, all of the files that are now suspect were in a batch of about 80k files total changing any variation of "various artists" to "VA" (my preference) - this batch was over maybe 6 or 8 actions of searching, selecting, making change in vertical tag editor, click save.

I also did another batch yesterday using Regex Search and Replace (^[0]) on Track# to remove leading 0's yesterday that was closer to 150k tracks. I did notice a few odd files after that, but its after the above that I really noticed things going south.

Its definitely file corruption. It sounds the same in VLC via 2 different outputs.

Of all the files in the batch, only some (by far the minority) are affected. Some albums have one track corrupted, others have several. In one case an entire album was corrupted. The corruption amount varies wildly. The tags appear intact, but the album art is often missing or also corrupted. I have not re scanned the files yet.

I'm 100% sure they were fine beforehand, as I have either played it before or have gone to an older backup and the files sound as expected.

all .mp3, and my output settings are WASAPI and as far as I know are as vanilla as possible (i.e. I haven't changed them since installing MB)

The only program used to edit anything on the affected files is MB.

Thanks

[sveakul]

Thanks for the details, appreciated.  Are you using MusicBee 3.3.6911?  Did the problem start after you updated to a particular build?

I think the best thing to do at this point is see if you can find an example of this happening that you can track step-by-step, which would then allow an expert here to duplicate those steps on his MB install and see if the end result is the same.  Also, it would help if you could upload an example of one of the corrupted files that someone here can take a close look at and see if it helps narrow down where the corruption is occurring and if it could be the result of a certain tagging operation.

You said you have not tried re-scanning the files yet;  please do that and let us know if it makes any difference.

Also, have you tried removing all tags from one of the files using another application (Mp3tag, Kid3, etc) and seeing if it affects how the file sounds?

Finally, please confirm that you have whitelisted the entire MusicBee folders(s) in any form of antivirus app you are using.  They can interfere with all kinds of file operations.  Even if it was causing no issues before, an update may have been delivered that has now started messing with MusicBee.

Good luck and I hope you can get this solved.

[mrbenn]

Re-scanning didn't yield anything interesting.

I'm about to start going through it, so will post a couple of example files as and when I find them.

I can't find any relationship between the files that are corrupted other than I changed the tags in bulk. Different names, folders, bitrates etc.

My only thoughts are that MB duplicated a task ID of some kind and just randomly mixed the audio of those files together. Thats a pure guess.

[mrbenn]

I've done a bit more digging and found a chkdsk log for the drive that shows all kinds of corruption.

I am going to put my hands up and admit that I am almost certainly wrong in thinking MB is the root cause of this - more likely that there were some unknown gremlins in the drive, and doing mass tagging in MB compounded that problem.

The log is dated from before my first post, and is logging chkdsk doing a repair silently which would explain why it came up as OK when I started looking into things, and I didn't get an alert there was something wrong.

Thanks

[sveakul]

Yep that would do it.  Kudos though for checking the log and also for keeping backups;  time to drop that drive like a bad habit.  Thanks for letting us know what happened instead of just disappearing as many do.

[mrbenn]

The drive is physically OK. I think the first re-tag batch was so large it took long enough to still be going when the backup is scheduled to start, and that started it off. I did the 2nd big batch the next day and that was the wrecking ball. Event Viewer has been a horrorshow.

Unfortunately its polluted the backup as well but I have a 2nd older backup which isn't broken, so I lose a few days of tagging / art fixes.

Moral of the story: Check drives often. Hubris has a cost. One backup is no backup.

Thanks