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Topic: Weird bug caused by overzealous disk cleaner? (Read 2605 times) previous topic - next topic
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Weird bug caused by overzealous disk cleaner?

I recently installed "foobar2000_v1.0.3.exe".  At about the same time I started to experiment with "CleanUp452.exe".

I didn't see any problems until today, and what was happening was so strange that it really took a bit of time to see that I was seeing a rather strange problem as I played Mp3 files on Foobar2000.  If I wasn't in the habit of playing Mp3 dj I might not have noticed that the album in the main playback list window was completely different from the album that was actually playing.  Yet if you watched the metadata; location; general display window the proper information was being displayed, and this changed correctly as each song changed during playback.  Call Ghostbusters... it was the album which had been loaded previously.  And yes,  I set my player to resume playback on startup.  Oh yes,  to confound this the album in the playback window was the correct album that I had been playing last before the one which was actually playing.  Got It?  You must be on your toes today.

And it got stranger from there.  Although my player was set to the default playback mode and the loaded album had not been randomized (remember,  the actual album being played was a previous selection from the past,  not the actual album loaded)  when additional selections were added to the playback list they were played back randomly.  In other words,  in a sense you could say that 'everything you know is wrong'.  Foobar was playing a past selection on a playback mode that never was selected.  And again: checking the selection dialogue my normal playback choices were clearly displayed.

Here is something I discovered.  Without closing the program,  if I changed all the playback settings and returned them to my normal settings,  Foobar200 appeared to be reset to playback with those newly selected settings, although not to play the most recently loaded album.  When I cleared the playback window of my most recent selection Foobar2000 continued to play the previous selection and show the last (or actually 'before last') album selection under metadata. When I added new selections and then reinitiated playback by clicking on those new selections Foobar awoke from it's dream and began to play the new album correctly.

Again,  I suspect that this has nothing to do with a Foobar fault and I am more suspicious of some action performed by my new experimental disk file cleaner.  But don't we love a mystery?  And perhaps this temporary glitch means something more to you than it does to me.

By the way... I love this player!  Thanks a lot for your work.

Details: Win Pro XP directx 9c,  no apparent spyware or viruses (Malwarebytes scanned and Avast and Spyware Terminator scanned and protected,  latest updates all around.)  Nothing else strange appears to be happening on the computer.

Weird bug caused by overzealous disk cleaner?

Reply #1 –
I'm already back to add some easily obtained information.

I opened the aforementioned disk cleaning software and let it scan in it's standard mode;  with a general disk search for index.dat enabled.  I noticed that the foobar2000 index.dat was one file which this software will delete in this setting.

Again,  I do not know if this is the cause of this problem but perhaps someone here might know better than I do?

Meanwhile,  I am certain that I can probably do without deleting this file... There is such a thing as too clean!

Weird bug caused by overzealous disk cleaner?

Reply #2 –
foobar's index.dat manages the playlists. Some parts of your description above seem to indicate that something with the playlists handling is wrong, my first thought reading your report was that you are looking at the wrong playlist while playing another one.

A possibly solution could be (if no backup is available) to save all playlists (press shift + main menu: File, Save all playlists) into an arbitrary folder, then to delete all playlists in foobar, to close and restart the application and then to load the playlists again for a proper rebuilding of the index.dat.
This is HA. Not the Jerry Springer Show.
 

Weird bug caused by overzealous disk cleaner?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Robertina on
foobar's index.dat manages the playlists. Some parts of your description above seem to indicate that something with the playlists handling is wrong, my first thought reading your report was that you are looking at the wrong playlist while playing another one.

A possibly solution could be (if no backup is available) to save all playlists (press shift + main menu: File, Save all playlists) into an arbitrary folder, then to delete all playlists in foobar, to close and restart the application and then to load the playlists again for a proper rebuilding of the index.dat.


Thank you for your reply.

I think that I was wrong to assume that the disk cleaning software was the demon in this situation.  I am not certain what is happening.  I have not used that software for many days and yet today,  part of the symptoms reappeared.  It was not the part of the reported problem related to possible ghost playlists,  but to incorrect playback actions taking place while another playback mode had been selected.  In this case foobar started to playback randomly when it was reopened,  in spite of the fact that the 'default' playback mode had been previously set.  Perhaps this could still be related to particular temporary files being deleted in the past by a disk cleaner.  I do not have a sophisticated enough understanding of foobar's software to be able to say anything about that.

For the same reason,  as you suggest that I might correct these problems by deleting previous playlists,  I should first tell you that I have saved very few of my own compiled lists.  These are not saved in any folders related to foobar and foobar would not be able to load them unless I manually directed it to these playlists.  The previous playlists actually relate to previous foobar sessions.  For example,  if I had left previous mp3 selections in foobar's window when the player had been closed,  these same titles would have re-appeared when I reopened foobar as part of it's normal operating process,  not because I had actually manually saved the selections as a playlist.  So if I am looking to delete that sort of process related playlist and I do not know enough about foobar to locate those old lists and delete them.  My best bet would be to carefully delete the entire installation and start again from scratch.

One detail bothers me.  I have foobar2000 installed on several of my machines and this problem never occured until I installed the most recent (as far as I know) update which is foobar2000_v1.0.3.exe.  While I was blaming the software which I only recently trialed for hard drive cleaning,  I had not used it for almost a week or more and today when I reopened foobar,  one of the symptoms of foobar breakdown reoccured.  This breakdown was not the one related to phantom playlists but to foobar playing back in a different playback mode than had been selected.  It was playing randomly while all the selecters for foobar showed that default playback modes had been chosen.

I would be more inclined to think that I either have a bad download of foobar installed or am encountering a bug in foobar2000_v1.0.3.exe.  So for me deinstallation might suggest it could be in my favor to go back to the last version of foobar2000 before v1.0.3.

Any thoughts?  I don't think I know enough about foobar to understand what could be happening here on my own.

Again,  thanks very much for your attention regarding this.