What does 'Corrupt Track' _actually_ mean?

[VorTechS]

Having generated 6 playlists on a new DMS and then stuck the DMS in the PhatBox only 1 of the playlists will actually play.

All the others are met with 'Your playlist is corrupted'.

I took a look at error_log.txt and it seems to be complaining about the content of the M3u files:

Code Select Expand

CORRUPT_FILE: #VorTechS - C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart Massey\My Documents\PhatHack Media Manager\Prompts\Prodigy Demo Tape.mp3
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #VorTechS - C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart Massey\My Documents\PhatHack Media Manager\Prompts\Prodigy Demo Tape.mp3
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #VorTechS - C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart Massey\My Documents\PhatHack Media Manager\Prompts\Prodigy Demo Tape.mp3
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #VorTechS - C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart Massey\My Documents\PhatHack Media Manager\Prompts\Prodigy Demo Tape.mp3
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #VorTechS - C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart Massey\My Documents\PhatHack Media Manager\Prompts\Prodigy Demo Tape.mp3
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #VorTechS - C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart Massey\My Documents\PhatHack Media Manager\Prompts\Prodigy Demo Tape.mp3
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #VorTechS - C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart Massey\My Documents\PhatHack Media Manager\Prompts\Prodigy Demo Tape.mp3
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #VorTechS - C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart Massey\My Documents\PhatHack Media Manager\Prompts\Prodigy Demo Tape.mp3
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put
CORRUPT_FILE: /dev/null
CORRUPT_FILE: #M.A.N.D.Y. - Put Put Put

The DMS does not have VIOT installed [but all the VIOT files are generated].
Do we know what causes the 'Corrupt_File' condition to be launched?  I've attached 4 of the M3u files.  P2.m3u seems to work fine.

Also, do we have any tools that validate the content of the files tracks.idx, tracks.dat, tracks.db, alpha.db and num_tracks.db?

[Anton]

I've had a 'corrupt track' announcement on some of my files that were VBR and/or too high of a bit rate for the Phatbox.  Some of them weren't really that high.  upper 200's IIRC.

I've also had some corrupt playlists.  I'm not sure why.  If I get that again, I'll try to save some data and let you know.

[Terry_Kennedy]

Having generated 6 playlists on a new DMS and then stuck the DMS in the PhatBox only 1 of the playlists will actually play.

All the others are met with 'Your playlist is corrupted'.

I get the "corrupt track" announcement when the "end time" of the last track in a .m3u is off the end of the MP3.

I've also had the PhatBox get out of sync w/ reality when this happens - the SSA announcements start talking about the first playlist on the DMS, when the stuff actually playing is something else.

This is with my custom-crafted .m3u/.pbx files for one .mp3 per album with .m3u seeking of tracks within the .mp3. This is an unsupported feature of the PhatBox, so I just worked around it (using -1 for the end time).

I've also found that the PhatBox can sometimes forget that it should do track seeking - "next track" goes to the beginning of the album. Pressin the "CD 1" button seems to fix this in most cases.

[VorTechS]

It's certainly an odd situation.  One thing sbingner found was that the M3U files had a Byte Order Mark in... so that's been removed, but doesn't solve the problem.

I regenerated the playlists in a different order and the end result was the same so I'm almost confident it's not the PhatBox data files but actually the contents of the M3U itself, as the same playlist plays.

My guess is it's a case issue as I'm writing the DMS track locations in mixed case, whereas I think both in the data files and the M3U's of PhatBox generated files they are explicitly lower case.  That'll be my next code change.

I'll be installing the level 10 logging rc files later today to see what (if anything) it yields.

[sbingner]

I'm not sure there is a player defined for "MP3"... perhaps you should list them as "mp3"

[Firefox]

Something way back in my dim and distant memory of the old Phatnoise forums seems to think it might be "unusual" accented characters or unicode characters that can cause the "corrupt track" annoucements problem.

Does someone still have a searchable dump of the old forums to check that thread? For that matter, can we host it somewhere for everyone to take a look at or is that still a no-no?

[VorTechS]

Or it could be tracks.dat with an integer written as the first value instead of the byte value for the number of tracks in the file.  That's another thing sbingner found, so I'll be trying that out tonight together with the level 10 RC pair.

So unicode could also be an issue?  Got a feeling something is being written as UTF8, might be the M3U.  Although I've got nothing special in the tracks being written so there are certainly no unexpected characters.  I might need to bear that in mind though. 

Thanks to both.  Here's hoping it works this time round eh? ;P

[VorTechS]

Well, fixing the track count seems to have helped a little.  I can now play 2 of the 5 current playlists!

A step closer.  I should have the full rc logs too for tomorrow's investigation.

[VorTechS]

Well, fixing the track count seems to have helped a little.  I can now play 2 of the 5 current playlists!

A step closer.  I should have the full rc logs too for tomorrow's investigation.

Logs now attached.  I've figured out that the 'Corrupt Track: /dev/null' equates to missing TTS files.
Not sure what the problem is with the 'mode' message not finding the track though....?

[Firefox]

Just a thought - did you allow for the fact that sometimes phatnoise used 1-based indexing in it's files and other times it's 0-based?

1-based:
=======
tracks.dat (position of track in each mode)
X.idx (the index files for each Artist/Album/Genre)

0-based:
=======
pX.idx (the index files for each playlist)
alpha.db (used for alphabet seeking)

Not sure if that could be screwing things up with your playlist file names/numbers?

[VorTechS]

Firefox, yes, I've followed the specification as on SixPack and I've been working with sbingner to take a look at the log files - and the data files to work out what's been going on.

Seems that the code for Signature signing had a bug/bugs in it - for a change not actually MY code either!  (Separate post under the hacking threads)

So I've re-generated the playlists, and also fixed the bug with the TTS files not being in WAV format and hopefully this will be it!  *fingers crossed*

[VorTechS]

That was it

All the playlists on my PhatHack Media Managed DMS worked a treat.
The next test will be the various VIOT modes, but I need to re-install the plugin for that.

Ooops, looks like a new feature to go into the DMS hack tools for Keg owners!