I'm a new user of foobar2000, in large part to get the ReplayGain function (at least initially; I may be drawn to some of its other features once I start playing around with it). At the moment, however, I'm still recovering from a software problem that caused about 1-5% of the files on the drive to be corrupted, so now I'm looking for a way to identify which of mp3 files got trashed. Is there a function in foobar I can use to scan mp3 files and let me know which ones are valid and which are corrupted?

Does the ReplayGain feature itself work for this purpose? In other words, if I ReplayGain a file and it produces a good result, is it safe to assume it was able to read the file all the way through and didn't encounter any data corruption?

Edit: In case it matters, the files that were corrupted were quite possibly overwritten by portions of other mp3 files, which suggests that any "fault tolerant" scan (e.g. searching sequentially for a frame header when it doesn't find one where it expects, and continuing from there if it finds one) might fail to detect a corrupted file.

Thanks!

mwalimu
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard drive?"

You can use the file integrity verifier from the additional components page for this purpose. After installing this component, the command "Utils/Verifiy Integrity" is available in the context menu.

I used the foobar "file verify" option to check about 40,000 files (took about 24 hours, but it worked nicely). It gives you a report you can save and sort, etc. Be careful though. It may identify certain files as having noncritical errors (I forget the exact language used in the output). You do NOT want to delete all these files. In my case, these were all related to the time of the files being a fraction of a second off from reported time. The files work and play just fine (in foobar, itunes, winamp, etc.--eveb gapless in itunes). And if fact, every file it noted this minor error on came from being encoded with an older MusicMatch 7.5 fgh based encoder.

By the way, I also used replaygain function on all these files in one batch using the "scan selection as albums (by tags). Obviously, make sure your tags are right first. The only issue I had in 40,000 files was dealing with compliation CDs. These weren't treated right (each artist ended up as a separate album from a replaygain point of view). I simply redid these replaygain settings a single album at a time (only had about 150 of these).

All in all, this all worked perfectly. And when I backup all these files to additional harddrives, I often run the file verify on the resulting files just to confirm things are ok.

You could also check out a program called MP3val. It will scan mp3 files for many different errors, and correct them if possible (such as your real time vs reported time error). I recently scanned my collection (only 3500 tracks or so) and it fixed all of my errors. Not sure what it would say/do about a corrupted file, but it's worth a shot.

Thanks! I'll have to see which of these other additional components might be good to have. I installed and ran the file verify on the set of files in question (about 360 of them). I think it took less than 10 minutes. It identified about two dozen files with errors (some of which may have been preexisting and unrelated to the recent HD problem), not counting those with the real/reported time discrepancy which appears to be pretty minor. That's a small enough number that I can examine them individully and decide what to do about recovering them.

A previous ReplayGain scan on the same set of files errored out on only two of them, so I think it's safe to say that ReplayGain, while it may be very good at what it does, is NOT effective at verifying file integrity. Interestingly, one of those two files was not flagged by file verify as having a critical error, though it did produce an warning message about having an unusually high track peak (in the thousands). I'm a little curious how ReplayGain came up with results for the files that failed file verify, but it's not something I'm going to spend a lot of time digging into.

I'll take a look at MP3val as well.