MP3 files

[SavannahLion]

Is there a way to batch analyze MP3's for corrupted or incomplete files?

I've got two almost identical directories of MP3's but they're both in such a state of disarray. It's not even a simple matter of merging the two directories since I really don't have any idea which MP3's are good and which are obviously corrupted. I'm also not interested in listening to each and every MP3 or manually examining the files just to figure it out.

I'm not looking to fix them. If they're corrupt, they're corrupt. I just don't want to merge either of these directories into my primary library and risk corrupting perfectly good files or having to spend months weeding out the bad files as I come across them.

[crashwg]

While it won't tell you which files are corrupt, DupFinder will give you a list of all the files that exist in both directories.

I don't believe it does a bit for bit comparison of the files though so.  Matter of fact, I don't really know what it is that it uses for comparison.  For the final "are these files exactly the same" I use Beyond Compare 2.  They're actually up to BC3, but I know you can find BC2 for free on the interwebs.

The reason I use both programs is that BC, as far as I know, only compares one folder to another and not something like file A in folder A to file B in folder B within folder C.  < Did that make sense?

[stace]

Never tried it myself but give this a go...

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Other-AUDIO-Tools/MP3-Checker.shtml

[SavannahLion]

While it won't tell you which files are corrupt, DupFinder will give you a list of all the files that exist in both directories.

Sounds like diff and Diff3 unless there's something I'm missing. So I've got that covered.

For the final "are these files exactly the same" I use Beyond Compare 2.  They're actually up to BC3, but I know you can find BC2 for free on the interwebs.

The reason I use both programs is that BC, as far as I know, only compares one folder to another and not something like file A in folder A to file B in folder B within folder C.  < Did that make sense?

It does. Sounds interesting too. I was going to wrap diff in Perl and get some similar functionality out of that. BC might be worth looking into. It'll save me the hassle of three human weeks worth of debugging for five minutes of CPU processing.

Never tried it myself but give this a go...

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Other-AUDIO-Tools/MP3-Checker.shtml

Sounds about what I'm looking for. Not sure if I want to deal with the ads though. I'll check into it.

[Xiaou2]

 Try running  "Spinrite"  on your drive, selecting the recover/repair option.  Its possible the
Hard disk area where the files are located got corrupted, and Spinrite may be able to
repair it.

 I found a few photos of mine were completely missing.. and after spinrite was ran,
they were back where they were supposed to be, fully in tact.

[drventure]

+1 Spinrite

Awesome little program that I haven't seen mentioned in ages!

I just ran my copy on a server HD that "supposedly" was bad (according to the raid anyway).

It's now in an external case used for moving files around.

[SavannahLion]

Ah... Steve. He's an old one. It's been a long time since I've ever seen anyone mention SpinRite.

While Spinrite (+1 on the suggestion, it's a tool I have forgotten) is a decent tool and I still use his ShieldsUp! (never exclusively) to get a general idea what my network looks like from the outside. Steve Gibson is a bit of self proclaimed techno-evangelist that tends to instill a doomsday mentality with his followers. He's got decent tools, I just wish he was a little less doomsdayer and a little bit more realistic with his papers. Take a look at his Raw Socket with XP paper to see just how far off he's gone.

But that is neither here or there.

I assure you, these MP3's are not corrupt because of a bad drive. They are largely corrupt because they are incomplete. I don't really have any details beyond this or the why of it. It just is.

In any case, all that remains (besides these files) of the HDD in question is an bin image (which I just remembered I have no idea where it is atm). The source HDD was re-purposed and is happily waiting to serve up web pages in my server. 

I did locate some promising source code that looks like it does what I want it to do. I'm going to see if I can compile it into a Perl module and reuse one of my comparison scripts. Worst comes to worst, I suppose I could use one of the other pre-made tools to at least remove the known bad files. Then remove duplicates and leave me with a tolerable number of files that listening and filtering them all won't kill me.