Saturday, March 9, 2013

Computer Woes: HELP! I'm Missing MP3 Tracks in Windows 7

I'm in a bit of distress tonight. I've had an ongoing project over the last several years to digitize and integrate our music collection into a cohesive whole. This involves taking all of our CDs and ripping them to my computer, along with bringing in all of the previous MP3s I've had on numerous older computers, as well as those tracks purchased online or downloaded (legally, thank you) from the library. This leads to--as many know--duplication problems, and also to a problem I haven't been able to find help for.

Click to embiggen.
See, I already did all of my ripping two years ago, and except for the odd CD purchased at the store or borrowed from the library, those files are just sitting there. And they're apparently disappearing. I have done no massive purge since I converted all of my files to MP3s. I did ditch all of my WMA files, but that was likewise a couple of years ago. And yet, if I pick a random artist, such as Duran Duran, I get this troubling outcome:


As you can see, though I long ago ripped these entire CDs, they've gone all Swiss cheese on me. Decade has only four tracks on it! The Wedding Album is mostly there, but missing track 3 and 6. Greatest is missing tracks 1, 3, 4 and 8. Why? And it seems to be the case with almost any artist I pick. This used to happen to me on older computers, and I just thought it was because they were old, crappy computers. The one I'm using now is absolutely not. I'm running Windows 7 on an i5 quad processor.

I want to know what the hell is going on, and how to stop it! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: I should note that I don't believe this is a virus or a worm. This is behavior I've run into before, just not in a long time. And while most of this music can be recovered by re-ripping the CDs (ugh), how do I know the files won't vanish again?

1 comment:

  1. Well, considering it's Durand, Durand....
    Actually, I feel your pain.

    ReplyDelete

Have something to say to us? Post it here!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...