HELP!!!

nooshinjohn

As my computer works to recover my files, I have noticed that my individual music tracks are being removed from the files that contained them... Example would be AC/DC Back in Black. The file itself is empty of the individual song tracks. The songs however are being recovered and saved alphabetically with every other song title.

Is there a way to solve this easily, or are my files so corrupted that I may as well start over?.?.

mdaudioguy

Your recovery program probably only recovers files, but not necessarily the folder structure. Your tracks are files. They were organized into folders (albums). That's doesn't mean the files are corrupted; just disorganized.

nooshinjohn

Does that mean I will need to place all 40,000 tracks back within their respective folders one b y one?

Clipdat

nooshinjohn wrote: »

As my computer works to recover my files, I have noticed that my individual music tracks are being removed from the files that contained them...

Remember John, the files are in the computer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_o_O7v1ews

mdaudioguy

nooshinjohn wrote: »

Does that mean I will need to place all 40,000 tracks back within their respective folders one b y one?

It depends. Most people prefer to organize their files like that (obviously you did), but music programs usually organize by tags. This might help.

https://www.techhive.com/article/3201150/how-to-manage-your-digital-music-library.html

Also, you should have made a complete backup of your files when they were previously organized...

joecoulson

John, if you invest in Roon or another quality music organizer, it should automatically do that for you without hand holding or reorganizing all the folders/files. Assuming the meta tags are accurate.

nooshinjohn

Recovery is done, and it looks like JRiver will sort the mess back out, but it keeps crashing halfway through reloading everything to it. I end up having to completely uninstall it and start over.

mhardy6647

... and that's why I love technolgy

I do feel for you (in all seriousness).
Sounds like progress's being made, though!

nooshinjohn

Thanks... just wish I could figure out why JRiver keeps kicking out the file transfer.

pitdogg2

meanwhile I stick those little shiny pucks on the tray and hit play.... WALLA tunes in order.

mhardy6647

Walla?

Wally?

Walleye?

Well I...?

Welly?

Wolly Bully?

et voila!

Nightfall

I just start humming to myself, voalá! Tunes in order.

mhardy6647

koala...

you know, I read that last post too fast; I thought it said humping to myself and it kinda weirded me out a little...

Nightfall

Ahh, yes, the sweet tunes of humping to yourself. Like stirring a pot of mac 'n cheese.

nooshinjohn

Been a long night of playing with hard drives and software. The good news is that I have been able to recover everything, including most of my vinyl transfers. I lost no documents or photographs, and all of my music is intact.

I will be going through the music by artist and title before reloading things back to JRiver. It will take additional time to do this, but I feel it is an important step to ensure the integrity of the new folder structure and will facilitate a better quality of backup for safekeeping as well as the NAS drive.

GospelTruth

Here's another thought about organization of your files if all you have is just the song names.

When I organize my music, I do place them in folders. They go Artist > Album > Songs. However, my file names for each song contain Artist-Album-XX-Song Name.flac where XX is the song number. That way it's easy for me to look by song to see the artist, album and song.

There are some applications out there that will take the meta data from a list of files (songs), and rename the file based on that data. For example, your song might be You Shook Me All Night Long.mp3. You specify the naming convention to be Artist-Album Title-Song Number-Song Name.mp3 by mapping the meta data to each part of the title. You hit OK and the song is renamed to ACDC-Back In Black-07-You Shook Me All Night Long.mp3.

While this won't get you your folder structure back, it does help in sorting the the files by artist and album so you can build the folder structure a little easier.

Just a thought. It does rely on you having the meta data populated correctly for all your music though.

I've used MP3TAG to do this.
https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

nooshinjohn

Well tonight I got the music going again, nut it will be a very long road to full recovery. More than half of my cover art is gone, and I am down some 250 or so CD's and LP's at this time. The good news is that those files are not lost and are easily found by searching for the metadata within the recovered files, and then breaking things down by artist/album and moving that data into a new folder and exporting it to JRiver.

This will take forever to do, but all the tools are in place and I have a path to move forward. I will be backing up the reconstructed JRiver files to a hard drive as I go so I will not have to do this ever again.

Clipdat

@joecoulson has some nifty software for automatically getting cover art back into files, maybe he could chime in.

nooshinjohn

As I try to fall asleep tonight, another idea popped in my head. I think I will try to recover file types as a group, then send those to JRiver and see if it will sort them out for me. Then I can back the library up to my hard drive and unzip the folder.

This should work and save a bunch of time.

joecoulson

The software I use for editing the tags and artwork is:

https://www.dbpoweramp.com/perfecttunes.htm

it can scan your entire library and autocorrect
Then you can customize from there (if it pulls lower res cover art you can override - but it does a good job of trying to grab 1000x1000 or better

Milito

That's the one I use Joe.

nooshinjohn

Big thanks to Joecoulson.... where I stand at the moment is I have repopulated JRiver, and it is stable and working as it should. So far, I have uncovered more than 150 albums that were missing tracks to varying degrees, so I searched within the backup and the recovered files to locate the material and replace the missing tracks.

It is a slow process, but I am about a quarter of the way through at this point. I have also found about 30 albums where the files needed to reconstruct them are gone from any record whatsoever. Most of them are still in my collections and can be easily replaced with a new transfer.

Thanks guys for the support and assistance.

Clipdat

Attaboy Coulson!

joecoulson

My pleasure John. Glad (albeit slow) it is working out.

nooshinjohn

The tally stands at 34 albums that are total losses, though I probably have most of them in either cd or Vinyl anyway. There may be a few that are just gone for good.

nooshinjohn

The final tally is in. Here is a list of the lost...


1) Pink Floyd, Crea/tion
2) Allman Brothers Band, Eat a Peach
3) Supertramp, Crime of the Century
4) Jefferson Starship, Deep Space, Virgin Sky
5) Van Halen, Diver Down
6) Paul McCartney, Driving Rain
7) Billy Joel, An Innocent Man
8) Rush, 2112
9) ABBA, The Visitors
10) Greta Van Fleet, Anthem of a Peaceful Army
11) Def Leppard, Adrenalyze
12) Rod Stewart, As Time Goes By
13) Elvis Pressley, A Legendary Performer
14) Elton John, The Very Best of Elton John
15) Michael Jackson, Thriller
16) Olivia Newton John, Totally Hot
17) Garth Brooks, Triple Live
18) USMC Band, The President's Own
19) AC/DC, Who Made Who
20) Van Halen, Women and Children First
21) The Beatles, Fly on The Wall
22) Peter Frampton, Frampton Comes Alive
23) Gordon Lightfoot, Gordon's Gold
24) Journey, Journey's Greatest Hits
25) Styx, Styx Greatest
26) The Oak Ridge Boys, Greatest Hits Volume 1
27) Clint Black, Greatest Hits Volume 2
28) Julian Lennon, Help Yourself
29) Gretchen Wilson, Here for the Party
30) Dwight Yoakam, Just Looking for a Hit
31) Van Morrison, Keep me Singing
32) John Denver, Legendary Performer
33) Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed
34) The Beatles, Love (Soundtrack)
35) Queen, News of The World
36) Hall and Oates, OOH YEAH!
37) The Police, Outlandos D'Amore
38) Styx, Return to Paradice
39) Kid Rock, Rock n Roll Jesus
40) Phil Collins, Serious Hits, Live
41) Reba McIntyre, Starting Over
42) The Allman Brothers Band, (self titled)
43) The Allman Brothers Band, Live at the Fillmore
44) Pat Benatar, The Best Of
45) The Grammy's 50th Anniversary
46) Time/Life Collections (various, 28 discs)

Nearly all of the files recovered came from my backup drive. Those that came from the corrupted hard drive have been virtually useless, and all attempts to recover those files an a manner that would make them useful have failed for the most part. J Rive worked best for putting things back in order, but even there, songs were missing from an additional 220 albums. In many cases, the cover art was loaded, and a single song. The titles listed above were recovered to JRiver, but all links to the songs within them were non-existent.

After this, all I can say guys is BACK YOUR MUSIC UP! From now on, I will be making sure I maintain a separate and isolated hard drive that will store nothing but music and I will be sure to keep it up to date.

polrbehr

nooshinjohn wrote: »

After this, all I can say guys is BACK YOUR MUSIC UP! From now on, I will be making sure I maintain a separate and isolated hard drive that will store nothing but music and I will be sure to keep it up to date.

I did this after my portable Seagate bit the dust a few years ago and I lost every song I had. Now I basically keep/play everything from my desktop (2TB internal hard drive), with an identical backup on an external WD 2TB. It's not perfect but it should keep me from going through what John just did. *fingers crossed*

PS. You lost a lot of good stuff there, I feel for ya!