Prevent & Detect corruption for Music/Data library - How?

[Primergy]

Situation:
For years (probably 8+) now I have been ripping my CDs to MP3 and added the albums to my library. Within the past 6Months I have switched over to FLAC as well.

Problem:
Over the years especially older material has been copied a few times
(HDD upgrades, etc..). I find myself with audibly corrupted / faulty tracks every now & then. (The current drive is without problems as far as I can tell.)

• What is the best approach to detect, or even prevent this corruption?

I have tried programs which are supposed to detect corrupted MP3s.
My impression is that they show many false positives. Perfectly ripped tracks are shown fine in one scanner, bad in some way in another

Maybe checksums are the way to go once I ripped a new CD / re-ripped an old one. Would there be any benefit in having MP3s archived (RAR)?
Neither my player, nor myself care. Obviously there is no gained space. FLAC - Archives become huge and unpacking when dropped into player takes time.
Is there a way to auto-check a corresponding checksum file if an archive is extracted for play / or unpacked songs are dragged into a player?

 

[jolancer]

Someone correct me please if im wrong im not an HD Guru but this is an educated guess from my broad random general knowledge...

If i recall properly.. HDs firmware and the OS filesystem's themself protect data to an extent automatically against corruption.

The files in question that you said have been transfered a few times between HD's, Are these really really old files? like getting transfered from FAT32 win98 or Some other types of older OS's/Filesystems?... Also how bad is the corruption your refering to? is it very small inconsitent, something that perhaps you *might of just never noticed on your older systems because the audio was perhaps rendered at lower khz or bitrate?

when storing or extracting from RAR or similar compression formats i think they automaticaly create and verify the checksum when packing/unpacking... but you can do that with any files without archiving or compression aps. Theres different aps and checksum formats out there. I use 'fsum' its command line only though, theres checksum aps with GUI's but im not familiar with any cause when i started using fsum long ago it was smaller faster more efficent and supports almost all checksum formats. There maybe something good out now with a GUI but someone else will need2 recomend. I use the MD5 hash checksum format through fsum
http://www.slavasoft.com/fsum/
these are pritty much the only commands i think i use for it -
after you place fsum.exe in whichever default working directory you prefer i just use root of C for example
-creates recursive MD5 hash of subdirectories
> fsum -jm -r -d"C\Path" * >"C\Path\name.md5.txt"
-run the checksum
> fsum -c -w -d"C\Path" name.md5.txt >"C\Path\name.output.log.txt"
(i left the ":" colon out from above path as you can see because it creats an emoticon)

creating your own checksum and verifying it on the other end of a transfer is basically what Free HD OEM transfer tools and other secure transfer apps do. you can go to any HD manufacturer website and they have free disk transfer aps.

EDIT: oh yeah, unless the source hardware or filesystem in question was alraedy corrupt or hardware on its way out/dieing... corruption wont normally just occur its not like copying from casset tape to another tape.

oh yeah i also have never used or know anything about aplications that are suppost to detect corruption in MP3s, i honestly dont see how thats possible unless somekinda checksum is automatically stored in the MP3 container?

you can check your filesystem for curruption though if its windows with checkdisk aka cmd: chkdsk C: /X /F /R /V > "C\Path\name.log.txt"

and for checking each sector of the drive i use MHDD, which is also bundled in SystemRescueCD, which i just use cause i can boot that directly from USB. EDIT: if you happn to try SystemResuceCD just fyi MHDD and other non linux specific bundled tools are option F near the bottom as shown here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemrescuecd/screenshots/259298

 

[VirtualLarry]

Look into "PAR2" archives.

 

[Mark R]

Look into "PAR2" archives.

This.

I recommend that you use the "multipar" software, as this is the ONLY PAR2 software that supports checksumming folders *and* actually works correctly. (Warning - there are a number of PAR2 programs out with bugs that stop them from recovering data).

As a further note about multipar, only use the PAR2 function; the PAR3 function, is still experimental and not finalized, and in its current version has a lot of problems.

Multipar