[kaupena]

I've just gotten off the line with AppleCare after a 2-hour battle resulting in them saying basically "you're on your own". I'm hoping that somebody out there might have some idea what might be going on with all (over 25,000) of my audio files.
The situation is this: I am a professional musician and keep a very large and ever-expanding library of music for research purposes in addition to numerous recordings of my own performances etc. Today suddenly, and without any sort of traumatic occurence (ie. system-crash, physical damage to any related hardware, etc.) itunes stopped recognizing any of my audio files. These files are in various formats (lossless, AIF, and m4a mostly) and had all been working seamlessly for years. What's even worse is that none of my other a/v type application recognize any of the files either! So not only can I not listen to anything as a reference- I can't access any of my own recordings or work! http://forums.applenova.com/newthrea...ewthread&f=11# I should add that I don't like the default organization that itunes insists on so I have come up with what I think is a much better hierarcy-based filing system that itunes has never minded working with (I've used it on my last 3 macs, I think since itunes 2.0 and never had any trouble whatever), but that's about the extent of the tweaking I've done to itunes itself.
If anyone has any ideas at all about what might have happened I would love to hear them. I'm wondering if this might be some sort of new virus which is directed at audio files.?????

[torifile]

I have no idea what's going on, but I can safely say that it's not a virus.

Have you tried the troubleshooting steps in the sticky in this forum? Do those first - repair permissions, clear caches, fsck your drive. If after this, you're still having trouble, post. Good luck.

[Ebby]

Do other programs make noises? Not necessarily play tour music, but make alert sounds and such?

If not, check your Audio MIDI setup and make sure you are outputting sound to the right device. I've had this before after running VLC and it killed my sound even after restarting. Changing it back and restarting again fixed it.

Oh, in iTunes, try to play a song and open the visualizer. If it freaks out like it should, this is more likely the problem. If not, my ideal won't work.

[kaupena]

OK, I tried some troubleshooting, and it looks like the problem may be with the external drive I have these files stored on. I ran the "verify disk" option in Disk Utility and it asked me to repair the volume, but when I tried to repair it it says:

Verifying volume “*Music Library*”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Invalid number of allocation blocks
The volume needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair

how can I get around this?

[kaupena]

sorry, I forgot to mention that all of the basic audio alerts are functioning throughout the system. The only affected files seem to be on my external drive...

[BarracksSi]

If Disk Utility or Diskwarrior can safely repair it without wiping everything out, do that. If not, you'll need to send it to a data recovery service.

[kaupena]

I've run all of the suggested drive tests, and it still seems that all of the files on this drive are damaged. What is strange though is that I still have access to all of the files, I just can't open them. If anyone has any ideas about the type of damage they might have suffered and whether or not I might have some sort of way of fixing them it would be very welcome.

[Kickaha]

The post above yours says it: if Disk Utility doesn't work, go buy a copy of DiskWarrior, and try that. If that fails, you're going to have to send it off to a data recovery service.

[Ebby]

Originally Posted by Dr. Kickaha The post above yours says it: if Disk Utility doesn't work, go buy a copy of DiskWarrior, and try that. If that fails, you're going to have to send it off to a data recovery service.

I had a drive die in June and took it to a data recovery service. Sure enough they sound stuff, but I also bought DataRescueX, disk warrior, and had Tech Tool Pro.
Tech Tool Pro did not really help. (In fact, I was running TTP when the drive died)
Disk Warrior could not mount the drive to repair
Sent it in for data recovery and came back weeks later with 60GB recovered. (from a 160GB drive)
Downloaded DataRescueX and recovered 110 GB of data. (Lots of data like MP3's were fragmented, but overall much more was recovered than the Data Recovery service.)

My recommendation at this stage: DataRescue