Corrupted music files

2005-01-21 15:22:55

Posting only to let someone know who might actually relate.

Defraging my hard drive with DiskKeeper 9, crashed the Windows Directory. Had just acquired a new Hard Drive, installed Windows and recovered all data from old drive.  After a bit of effort & time, everything is restored. 

However now discover that many music files are corrupted with: wrong file names, wrong Tags, some have fragments of several titles within the same file.  Looks like a large percentage survived unharmed, but I am unable to determine without listening to each entire track.  ~7,500 titles. 

Don't know a good way to recover from this easily.  Re-ripped a couple albums last eve.  I have ~5,500 titles recently backed-up to CDR, but it was a file by file backup so they could more easily be played through the DVD.  My 1st thought is to bring-up each CDR within FB2k, sort by Artist/Album/Title and copy groups into appropriate directories, overwritting the existing files.  This will take some time but figure less time than re-ripping all of this.  An alternative may be to move all existing files into one large directory, then simply copy each CDR into that directory allowing it to overwrite -but concerned that there may be many duplicate file names thereby losing some titles entirely.

Anyway thanks for reading.

Corrupted music files

Reply #1 – 2005-01-22 07:02:28

http://www.geocities.com/mp3utility
It could help you find most of such badly damaged MP3s

1. First, figure out the problem caused this. [DiskKeeper,unreliable filesystem,LBA48 problem,...] (without this, the last steps may be useless)

2. Restore/rerip damaged files from backups

But to be really sure everything is OK IMO you should rerip/restore ALL

Corrupted music files

Reply #2 – 2005-01-24 14:35:32

Many more files were damaged than I had 1st thought, will have to delete the entire \My Music directory. Odd that all jpg files in \My pictures were undamaged, yet .jpg files (Album art) within \My Music are corrupt.  I have restored ~5,300 titles from my CDR backups, file by file into one large directory.  When duplicate filenames appeared I copied them to a temp directory, then renamed them (Why.mp3, Why1.mp3, Why3.mp3).  I have the rest (~2,500 titles) on CDR at the beach-house.

At least I listened to this forum and made backups.  CDR was a good method as <10 titles did not survive and required me to re-rip just a few albums.

But now that I have 2 PCs with large drives I have setup an app called vuBrief (freeware) to maintain the data through synchronization across the LAN.  Therefore with a Ghost of each PC's OS & Apps and mirrored data, my next crash will not be as difficult a recovery.

It was definately DiskKeeper 9 which caused this so I will never use again, however Spyware may have contributed as I didn't run the removal utility prior to the defrag attempt.  Norton SpeedDisk appears to disable all subroutines prior to defragmentation, so this (SystemWorks)  is installed on each PC.