I have a serious issue with an old music library that I use. It’s about 25gigs in size and for some reason in the last while, every track in Serato DJ is coming up as corrupt. The tracks play fine about 90% of the time, but that other 10% it causes a dropout of a few seconds. I ran it by Serato help, and they did what I had already done, and used iTunes to re-encode. The issue with that is iTunes changes the file names (applies the Apple naming convention, putting the files in a folder (artist name) and then the file (track name) within.) When you search for a file using finder, you’ll then only find the track name and not the artist name bla bla bla.
Basically, I want to re-encode folders of tracks at a time without changing the filename at all so that I can perform a recover tracks, and serato with find the new tracks as replacements since they will be the exact same name.
I hope this makes sense. I have no way of getting new collections as these were inherited over the last 10yrs and sifting throughout them to find the ones that I actually use, and repurchasing them, would take for ever.
As a one-time “Get out of hell free” card, re-encoding is not the worst option. It would never be my “Plan A.” This is referred to as “transcoding” and it does introduce errors into the re-encoded mp3. This mostly manifests as a slightly increased noise floor. Re-encoding once or twice is not a big deal (but should still be avoided when possible).
Be sure that this will actually resolve the issue by testing with a COPY of a couple directories worth of songs you know to be corrupt now. Then…once you have a working collection…BACK IT UP!!!
Longer term, I’d report the !@#$ out of this to Serato and find out how tracks get into this state and the avoid doing that ever again.
I have no idea if it will work for you, if it works at all. It’s free, so it might worth a try anyway. I’ll be running some tests in the near future, I’m really hoping it works and eliminates that damn Traktor errror.