Radio automation depends on every file in your library being a real, playable audio file. A zero-byte file, a truncated download, a rip that stopped short, or a file damaged in a copy can cause dead air, skipped songs, or silence in the middle of a broadcast. The Baddie Detector finds those files so you can fix them before they reach the airwaves.
You'll find it under Import ▸ Detect, on the Baddie Detector sub-tab beside Music Sleuth.
A song is marked Damaged when its audio file can't be played all the way through:
.mp3).A read error within the last few seconds of a file is ignored. Plenty of perfectly healthy MP3s have a quirk at their very last frame, and flagging them would be a false alarm.
Librarian reads each file all the way through, quietly in the background, and marks a damaged song the moment it's found. A progress bar shows 212 of 438 · 7 damaged, with a Stop button; anything found so far stays marked. When it finishes, a summary line says how many songs were checked and how many were damaged.
Librarian remembers what it has checked. The next time you run a check on the same songs, files that haven't changed since are skipped, so repeat checks are much faster than the first one.
The first check of a big library reads every audio file in full, so it takes a while, longer on a network or external drive. Librarian keeps it gentle (two files at a time) and you can keep working while it runs.
Librarian does not read all your audio at launch. That full check is what Go! is for.
Beneath the Go! button is the list of every damaged song in your library, grouped by folder. Each entry shows the song's name, its file name, and the reason it was flagged (for example it fails near 0:16 or the file won't open). Each has two choices:
Click Replace… and choose a good copy of the song. Librarian first plays your chosen file all the way through, and if it isn't good either, it tells you and changes nothing. Otherwise:
Click Delete and confirm. The file goes to the Trash and the song leaves your library.
Each song has a checkbox, and a Select All checkbox above the list checks or clears every song shown. Delete Selected moves all the checked songs to the Trash after one “Are you sure?” message that says how many are going.
Undo Last Change reverses the last Replace or Delete, including a whole Delete Selected batch: files come back out of the Trash, and the library entries return.
Nothing here deletes files permanently. Everything goes to the Trash first, so you can still recover a file you removed by mistake.
library.tsv), the song's Health field reads Damaged. A blank Health field means no problem was found. See Health Field.
The flag clears by itself when the song is repaired: replace the file with Replace…, or put a good file in its place and open the song in Transitions or check it again with Go!. Nothing to reset.
The Health field is where other TuneTracker apps look. Starting with ClockWork 1.1.181, TuneStacker never adds a flagged song to a program log. See Damaged and Missing Songs in the ClockWork help.
The size threshold is configurable in Settings (Librarian › Settings…). Look for the Min file size field, where you can enter a number and choose either KB or MB from the dropdown. The default of 8 KB is a good starting point: a half-second mono MP3 is already about 9 KB, so anything below 8 KB is almost certainly not a usable audio file.
If you work with very short sound effects or micro-clips, you might want to lower this value. If your library only contains full-length songs, you could raise it (for example, to 50 KB or even 100 KB) to catch more marginal files.
AutoCast trusts the library. If a file is listed in the database, AutoCast assumes it can play it. A damaged file in the rotation means dead air, the worst thing that can happen on a radio station. By finding these files in Librarian, while you may still have the original CD, download or backup, you fix them before they ever reach the broadcast chain.