Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

[EliAbbe]

I have two problems while ripping CDs to FLAC. Some CDs work fine, but for almost half of my CDs, I get a crash (at address 0x77fccaad) in MusicConverter.exe, either right at the end of the CD or, sometimes, in between tracks. CDGrab.exe itself keeps running and I can start ripping again and it will eventually rip all of the tracks. This is annoying, but not impossible. The second problem, which is impossible, is that some of the tracks end up with no tag information in them. The whole reason that I am using FLAC is because I recently got a Sonos system (which works great!), and the tracks withoug tags will not show up in my library.

Has anyone seen this problem,and even better, propose a workaround? My configuration is a laptop with win2K. I upgraded to the Beta version (11.1) of the Music Converter and I am using version 5.2 of FLAC. Any suggestions are welcome.

[ChristinaS]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

Are you doing fast ripping or slow? try slow, and priority of conversion below normal.

[EliAbbe]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

I don't see aplace to set the speed as fast or slow. Can you let me know how to conrol that?

I tried your suggestion of setting the "Priority" to Low and this time it did not crash, but I am still missing tags on all but the first track.

I tried another experiment - I ripped one track at a time and they all worked fine.

[ChristinaS]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

I don't see aplace to set the speed as fast or slow. Can you let me know how to conrol that?

I tried your suggestion of setting the "Priority" to Low and this time it did not crash, but I am still missing tags on all but the first track.

I tried another experiment - I ripped one track at a time and they all worked fine.

That would be in Options - under Drive options (last section in that window). I have mine set to slow ripping and ripping speed 4x. I hevan't tried anything faster, this works fine for me and I'm also using Windows 2000, but on a desktop.

Also in the Powerpack options (click on the Power rocket, top right side), I use Rip to ram with auto as maximum.

Are all the tracks found in freedb?

[EliAbbe]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

Thanks for the quick responses! Unfortunately, none of this fixes the problem. I do have a debugger on my system and I can provide a view of the stack at the point of the crash. It is about 5 levels deep into FLAC.dll and then calling into the C runtime. I can provide the offsets for the call at each level in FLAC.dll. The crash itself is in the Windows Kernel.

I guess I will try it on another computer and hope for the best.

My only theory is that it may be related to accented characters and/or punctuation characters in the titles of the songs (yes, theay are coming from freedb). Any advice on special character translations that cuase and/or avoid trouble? I noticed that <question mark> is set by default to <inverted question mark> which seemed odd.

[ChristinaS]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

I would rip to wave first, fix the names and convert the lot to whatever after that.

I don't normally have problems with ordinary accented characters in names and tags, but maybe the other special characters are different. Haven't run into those yet.

There are some settings in dMC Configuration concerning the ID tags and UTF-8 and unicode, but they are supposed to be for mp3 tags. Don't know, maybe you can do something with that.

[Spoon]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

Was it crashing when using dMC R11? (non beta version)

[EliAbbe]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

Yes, that is why I tried upgrading to the Beta.

[EliAbbe]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

Spoon -

Do you ever make your source available??? I would be happy to debug this problem for you and send you the fix if I find one.

I believe you have my private contact info from my registration if you would like to follow up. I can also provide some personal reference information.

[Spoon]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

Sorry the source is not avaliable. You can try a different audio format, to see if it is flac specific.

[EliAbbe]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

OK, Ogg Vorbis and Monkeys Audio both rip fine. (This is good!) I tried converting the Monkeys files to FLAC and there was no crash and SOME of the files had tags (the first five), but the rest of the files did not.

Unfortunately, I really need FLAC because that is the only lossless format supported by the SONOS Digital Music Player. I think I will suggest to them to support Monkeys Audio.

Is there a way that I can download the previous version of FLAC (5.1)? It would make an interesting test to see if it has the same problem.

Also, if I can help in any way to diagnose the problem that I am having, I would be glad to.

[EliAbbe]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

CORRECTION
I did get the crash when converting from Monkeys to FLAC, but only after I clicked the "Finish" button in dMC. That is also the behavior that I had for SOME of my CDs when ripping directly to FLAC. Some would crash after a few tracks and some would crash after clicking "Finished".

[Spoon]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

I have noticed there are various bugs in the flac code when it comes to tagging, I will note as a bug to be looked at more.

[EliAbbe]

Re: Crash in MusicConverter and Missing Tags

I tried again, installing on a different computer, this one using XP Home. I have the same or simialr problems with it - tags missing when I rip to FLAC and a crash when the ripping is complete. I also have these problems when converting a batch of files from Monkeys to FLAC.

One note - The first track that I rip in a batch always seems to be OK. I was able to rip a problematic CD but just ripping each track separately. Kinda PAINFUL!

For now, I am ripping to Monkeys and then converting to Ogg Vorbis at its highest bit rate for playing on the Sonos system. I am keeping a copy of the Monkeys and when the FLAC thing is fixed, I will convert to FLAC and delete the Monkeys and the Ogg Vorbis.

Let me know if you would like to see my stack trace for the crash.

Also, is there a place where I can still get FLAC 5.1 to see if that works any better?