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Topic: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation) (Read 2733 times) previous topic - next topic
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Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Hi all,

I had a major issue with foobar the other day. I'm not sure if it happened because of hibernation, or because foobar closed due to no RAM available the other day, but when I tried to run foobar again, it told me that it's having trouble loading my data and config, offering to "ignore", "abort" and "try again". After trying again a couple of times with no success, I aborted, only to try restarting foobar again which offered the same choice...Finally, I went with "ignore" which resulted in my config gone, library missing from the left pane, and MISSING PLAYLISTS. This is a huge deal for me because I work on those playlists daily, and eventually use them as a basis for my djing. If I don't recover them, it would mean something like 3-4 months of my selection work (which means hundreds of tracks, if not thousands) is lost!

As a similar thing happened to me last year, I've got foo-jesus at the time but apparently it didn't backup my playlists folder because it's called playlists-v1.3 and not playlists ! (for the record, I haven't renamed that folder, I guess it's just plugins not working well with one another unless you set them up  :(  :(  :( ) . It only backed up my theme file, the configuration folder, and index-data folder, which is empty in all the backups. And yes, thank you, I set the Jesus to save me next time by covering for all playlists* folders, but that's not gonna help me with what happened now.

So, after ignoring the error foobar pointed to me, there have been playlists loaded, and the same number of them like there were originally, but they've lost their names, now being called something like (I forgot exactly) "saved playlist 001", "saved playlist 002" etc, with no songs inside. When I went to the playlists-v1.3 folder in the foobar folder, there were those playlists, but not empty files (as you can see in the attachment), with what might be their original file sizes. I attached one of them (along with index.dat) just in case somebody knows what to do with it. I backed that folder up, as I'm hopeful that they still contain all the original songs, but I haven't been able to extract the data since they were still rendered as empty when loaded into foobar. Any ideas on how I can extract the original data from them? Is the index.dat file messed up and needs fixing? And no, loading them to foobar and trying to save them as m3u didn't work, it simply gave me empty playlists.

I'm running foobar 1.3.8 in regular mode (non-portable) on Windows 7.

Any ideas? Any help whatsoever would be immensely appreciated!!!

Re: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Reply #1
You can try opening one of your zip files (most likely located in foobar2000/autobackup) and overwriting your existing installation with the contents. Presumably you have multiple zip files with different dates, try all of them. If that doesn't work your settings (things that were set to be backup up) were most likely inadequate and need to be tweaked.

If your job/hobby/whatever relies on these files, you should make more effort towards securing them. Consider using a portable installation and backing that one up as a whole (or the corresponding directory for a regular install). Use a software that mirrors it/backs it up to a separate drive. Maybe a separate PC. Maybe back it up online at regular intervals. Storage space nowadays is fairly cheap so it's better to just go slightly overkill with backups so you can thank yourself later when things go bad.

Speaking of that, you should research why things get corrupted in the first place.

Re: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Reply #2
there were those playlists, but not empty files
Actually they are empty. They contain no information at all, only 0x00 bytes. So, there is no chance to get your playlists back, if you don't have a backup.

Re: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Reply #3
You can try opening one of your zip files (most likely located in foobar2000/autobackup) and overwriting your existing installation with the contents.
This won't help. As @spaceploit already pointed out his playlists were not considered for backup by foo_jesus.

Re: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Reply #4
So yeah, I guess foobar overwrote all the actual data inside the playlists with 0x00 bytes upon the crash.......nice
thanks guys.

Re: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Reply #5
Guess I should stop reading stuff half asleep. For some reason I read that as OP already had this problem before and has adjusted the settings then. My bad.

With that said, this (people not adjusting the component settings for v1.3 playlists) seems to be recurring problem. Perhaps the best course of action would be to put out a warning at the component download page suggesting people to make said changes?

Re: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Reply #6
Absolutely, something like that is necessary.
I thought I took sufficient action to prevent this from ever happening again, but I didn't know better....

 

Re: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Reply #7
Also, you can right click on the tab of any playlist, select "save playlist", and save it anywhere you want, as often as you want.

Re: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Reply #8
Also, if I may add, and any foobar developers are reading this - as a programmer myself, I can't help but notice that the way Foobar handled this crash was pretty bad. The situation was that the computer is left with no RAM, causing foobar to crash. My question is why does Foobar attempt any writing with no available memory? I know it's usually saving all the data upon the closing, but in this case it resulted in overwriting empty bits over the actual data...Simply no writing whatsoever in a special circumstance like this would be much better.

Re: Playlists lost after foobar crash (or hibernation)

Reply #9
If you had no foo-jesus, you would have lost all settings for the entire session, including your playlist changes, and any new playlists, unless you had manually triggered a successful configuration save.

Wait for a 2.0 or something, I guess? I think what's cycling around the Mobile platforms now has live changes applied to Sqlite-based formats on disk, and as a result of less in-memory caching, will also be less likely to be itself a cause or a victim of running out of memory. Note that this miraculous total rewrite of much of everything is nowhere even near coming to a desktop version*, so I wouldn't hold my breath or anything. Plus, even if it did come to a desktop version, components would need to be updated to work with much of the differences, including adding even new interfaces to inputs. Just know that this new stuff will likely handle super giant libraries a lot better than the current release, or at least shouldn't munch your memory like crazy. Maybe a hope for you some day.