Librarian Now Catches Damaged Audio Files Before They Reach the Air

Every radio person knows the sound of a file going wrong on the air: a song starts, and then nothing. Or it starts, stutters, and stops halfway through. Or the automation reaches it, can't play it, and moves on, leaving a hole in the hour. The listener hears dead air, and the station sounds like nobody is home.

Files rarely arrive that way on purpose. A download gets interrupted. A copy to a new drive doesn't quite finish. An old disk starts to fail. A rip stops short, or a file gets damaged in transfer. Often the file looks perfectly fine in the library. It has a name, a length, and a place in the rotation. The trouble only shows when someone tries to play the whole thing, and by then the song is on its way to air.

That's why we added a new tool to Librarian: the Baddie Detector.

What the Baddie Detector Looks For

It catches two kinds of trouble: files that can't be opened at all, and the sneakier kind, files that open normally but can't be played all the way through. The second kind is the dangerous one. The song appears to load, and nothing seems wrong until it hits the bad spot partway through.

You decide when to look, and Librarian also keeps an eye out as you work:

• When you run the Baddie Detector. Choose the songs to check in the file list (press Cmd-A to choose a whole folder, or the whole library) and click Go!. Librarian reads each file all the way through, quietly in the background, with a progress bar and a Stop button. It remembers what it has checked, so the next run skips songs that haven't changed.
• When you open a song in Transitions. The moment you load a song to work on it, Librarian reads it, and a damaged one is flagged right there.
• At launch. Librarian does a quick check for empty or far-too-small files, and if it finds any, it takes you straight to the Baddie Detector.

Librarian does not read your whole library every time it starts. A full check reads every audio file from end to end, so it's something you run on purpose.

How a Damaged Song Shows Up

A damaged song is marked right in the song list with red text and a ⚠ warning symbol, so it stands out at a glance. In the Baddie Detector, every damaged song in your library is listed in one place, grouped by folder, with the reason it was flagged. In your library file, library.tsv, the song's Health field reads “Damaged.” A blank Health field means no problem was found.

The point of all this is timing. You find out about a bad file while you may still have the original: the CD in the drawer, the download in your account, the copy on the old drive. You don't find out at 2 a.m. when the silence starts, with the source long gone.

Replace It or Remove It, Right in the List

Each song in the list has two buttons:

• Replace… lets you browse to a good copy. Librarian plays your replacement all the way through first and turns it down if it's damaged too. A good one takes the old file's place, the old file goes to the Trash, and the song's details carry over: artist, album, genre, cover art, and your own fields. Its EOM, Cue and Ramp marks start fresh, because they belonged to the old audio.
• Delete moves the file to the Trash and takes the song out of the library.

Cleaning up a whole batch? Tick the checkboxes, or use Select All, and click Delete Selected. One “Are you sure?” message tells you how many songs are going, and Undo Last Change puts the whole batch back. Nothing here is deleted for good, because everything goes to the Trash first.

Fixing a file outside Librarian works too. Put a good copy in place, and the flag clears the next time the song is checked or opened in Transitions.

Part of a Bigger Plan

TuneTracker apps share information with each other, and the Health field is where Librarian leaves its findings for the rest of the suite. Librarian's own AutoCue already skips damaged songs, and starting with ClockWork 1.1.181, TuneStacker keeps flagged songs out of your program logs too. It also leaves out any song whose file can’t be found when you generate, such as music on a drive that’s offline. See Damaged and Missing Songs in the ClockWork help.

Why It Matters

Dead air is the one thing a station can't take back. A bad song in a log is a quiet risk that sits there for days or weeks until the clock reaches it. With a Baddie Detector that reads your songs all the way through, a risk like that is found early, shown plainly, and fixed from one list.

The Baddie Detector is part of Librarian, and it's built into TuneTracker System 7. To get it, choose Check for Updates in Librarian.