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OMG 2923 of MP3 lost Track Number

Asked by McoreD,

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McoreD

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What a Christmas present....

Hi All,

Hope you all had a nice Christmas.

Here begins my rant...

When opened up iTunes as usual today morning, I realized iTunes couldn't locate bunch of the files. When checked Windows Explorer, I saw many files had got renamed.

For example

from: Sean Paul\Dutty Rock\05 Get Busy.mp3

to: Sean Paul\Dutty Rock\Get Busy.mp3

So I backed up the iTunes Library, recreated a new iTunes Library. I ran a file tag checker and found out 2923 tracks were missing Track Number. The old iTunes Library didn't show me this. So I have permanently lost the Track #. I can't run a program like Tag&Rename because not even the file name has the track #.

Currently I am using MusicBrainz to read tags from CDDB to recover as much possible.

While digging into the problem, I noticed a few things:

None of the M4A songs were affected.

All the files which got track # missing had the Date Modified from 2006-09-28 with time varying from 16:45 to 19:45.

So whatever did this modified the files on 2006-09-28, couldn't do it for M4A files. It also has started doing the damage from A to Z, but couldn't go pass W because I may be rebooted the PC.

It seems like the actual files were not renamed until last night because iTunes would have complained otherwise. The only thing I installed last night was WMP11 but didn't even add any music to its library.

I was wondering if strange things like this has happened to you guys before, and what sort of software programs are known to be causing this kinda behavior.

Thanks,

McoreD

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Experienced

McoreD

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Posted

Okay guys, mystery solved and problem solved too.

It turns out that I am not alone in this: http://72.14.235.104/search?q=cache:9OaUUX...t=clnk&cd=1

Mystery:

On 2006-09-28 I had installed WMP11 Beta and added the F:\Music to the library. WMP was smart enough to remove all the track numbers while it?s going through my music. The reason why M4A files were not affected is because of this.

Strangely from 2006-09-28 to 2006-12-25 iTunes continued to play these files in Administrator account. iTunes did not rename them for example from: Sean Paul\Dutty Rock\05 Get Busy.mp3 to: Sean Paul\Dutty Rock\Get Busy.mp3 because its iTunes Music Library.xml was still having the proper track number! Wished iTunes could fix the missing track number in the file by reading the iTunes Music Library.xml.

So on 2006-12-25 morning I created a new Windows account, McoreD, and imported the music to iTunes. Now iTunes started renaming the files without track number, for example from: Sean Paul\Dutty Rock\05 Get Busy.mp3 to: Sean Paul\Dutty Rock\Get Busy.mp3.

So when I logged on back to Administrator account only, I realized iTunes couldn?t locate bunch of the files.

Solution:

Manually fixing the track numbers was so time consuming. Later on the night I figured out a way to read the Administrator?s iTunes Music Library.xml and programmatically update the track number of tracks that was missing the track number. For this to work, McoreD?s newly created iTunes Music Library.xml needs to be active in iTunes because otherwise iTunes will *think* the track has the track number.

I came to work after letting the program do its thing. Approximately 2 hours it takes for parsing 8000 songs and updating the track number. So hopefully when I am back home it is al:Ddone. :D

More then?

Cheers,

McoreD

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