Mysterious MP3 behavior...PLEASE HELP!!!

[cdburnerrr]

 
Hello All,

   I built my own jukebox that currently houses 3 hard drives. A 60 Gig for the OS (Windows XP Pro), and two 200 Gig drives for the MP3 files (NTFS). There is currently about 350 Gigs worth of music on the 2 hard drives. The vast majority of my music is ripped from my CD collection. Some of the music has been downloaded from the internet. All of the music is divided by Genre (Rock, Country, Top 40), then within each Genre folder are Artist Folders (Garth Brooks, Prince, Madonna) and within each artist folder are the Albums from that Artist, each in their own Folder.

Here is my problem: Let's say I have 5 Albums from Garth Brooks. 3 of them I ripped from my own CD's and 2 of them I downloaded. I never seem to have a problem with the music that I ripped from my Cd's, but if I download two CD's and listen to them, they play fine. I transfer them to my Jukebox in the basement and they play fine. A month later I try to play one of the CD's I downloaded and instead of playing the Garth Brooks song it is supposed to play, a country song from a different artist starts to play. And it doesn't start at the beginning of the song, it starts halfway through some other artists song, then goes to the next song from this new artist.

If you exit out of the jukebox program and look at the files in Windows Explorer, you go to the Country folder, then to the Garth Brooks folder, then to the Fresh Horses album folder, open it up, and it lists all the songs that are supposed to be on that album, but the Artist and Album names are missing on half or even all the songs in that folder. Any file that is missing the Artist and Album tags is playing a different song by a different artist. And it only seems to happen to music I have downloaded, and it only seems to happen to the most recently downloaded stuff.

If I download 3 albums last month, 3 albums last week and 2 albums this week, when my system decides to screw up, it will mess up the albums I downloaded this week, and maybe the ones I downloaded last week, but will leave the ones I downloaded last month alone.

Both hard drives are Western Digital Drives and neither one is over 2 years old. They are formatted in NTFS, and I'm running Windows XP Pro. I can't be the only person this has happened to. If anyone else has had this problem, or better yet knows what I can do to prevent it from happening, please let me know.

Thanks!

[Barry Barcrest]

What software are you running?

[Silver]

The starting half-way sounds odd - but this depends on your software.

Could be an issue with tags - downloaded music notoriously can have multiple tags, multiple versions of tags, and incorrect tags. Different software treats mp3 files with multiple tags differently.

Also, I've seen some software (e.g. Windows media player/library) has settings where it will try and update tag info from the interenet "automatically" which I can almost guarentee will promptly mess up your tags.

Either spend some time sorting the tags out, or use a jukebox software that can be told to ignore tags and only use your folder layout - which sounds sensible for you...

[cdburnerrr]

My jukebox software is SK Jukebox, but when the albums get screwed up, it doesn't matter what you play it in...Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes...They all play it the same way.

I don't think it's simply a tagging issue. It's more like the pointers on the hard drive are messed up. All my tags will be correct, every song labeled with the artist and album name, then for some strange reason, the last few albums that I downloaded will get corrupted. and it usually stays within the same Genre. If the last few albums I downloaded were Top 40, when they get corrupted, they will play different songs from the Top 40 folder.

My kids have access to the jukebox, so i suppose it could be due to an improper shutdown or something like that, but it seems like if an improper shutdown was going to corrupt anything it would be something on the C: drive, not the drives with just music on them.

I can't believe I am the only person who has encountered this problem?

Thanks,
Mark

[Space Fractal]

it a hardware failure around your system.

If songs from the problem HD run fine from on a other system, it maybe something wrong with the machine. It dosnet meen a error on HD, but some other elements.

It could been a external USB card (yes unstable USB card can really mess up the system), ram/cpu/motherboard failure, but it can been a failure on the HD.

I have even seen a subwoover have screwed up a hardddrive and it was needed a reformat on it to get it work again. When the subwoover pulled abit away, there was not a problem since then, strange (simular like this prolem, but did with system files as well and was no virus or such).... Here we have backup of all music, so it was not a problem.

[richms]

Weird stuff like that can happen if you write to the disk on another machine that has different drive accessing then the one you are reading on. Compaq machines are terrible for this IME, the bios has an option called either Bitshift or LBA assisted.

That doesnt seem to affect drives connected by USB, but its caused many an issue for me with swapping drives out of a compaq machine to another since no other motherboards have the bitshift option.

If you write anything to the disc, you end up causing irrecoverable corruption since it overwrites different things etc, if you have written some to it in one machine and some in another then your in for a fun time getting the files off it.

If you have only ever written to it in one machine, then ignore all that, you have something worse going on like ram/hdd controller/hdd failure.