The numbers
| Problem | Songs | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Uneven volume | 34,576 | A step of 1.5 dB or more away from the normal level of the library. |
| Silent ends | 11,291 | Songs that end with five seconds or more of silence. |
| Songs with extra copies | 10,391 | 18,913 extra files in all, about 169 GB. |
| Names to tidy | 5,485 | Track numbers, download-site leftovers, and missing artists. |
| Mix-CD tracks that stop dead | 2,557 | Taken from DJ-mix CDs. The files are not damaged. |
| Very short clips | 469 | Shorter than 90 seconds. |
| Files that will not load | 265 | 220 M4A files, 43 WMA files, and 2 paths that were too long. |
| Corrupt or incomplete files | 202 | Broken in the middle, or missing their ending. |
| Two songs in one file | 193 | A long silence in the middle of the file. |
What stands out
The biggest problems are the quiet ones. Uneven volume and silent endings touched tens of thousands of songs, and neither stops a song from playing, so nobody notices them until two songs meet in a mix.
Duplicates take real space. Almost nineteen thousand extra copies came to about 169 GB, which is more than the whole of many laptops' drives.
The damaged files are few, and they matter most. The scan found 202 corrupt or incomplete files out of 60,902, and that is a third of one per cent, and it is the group that can fail in the middle of a set.
How long the scan took
Finding exact copies, empty files, and odd file types took 25 seconds on 60,525 files. Scanning every song for damage and silence took about 7.7 hours, at about two songs a second, and the longer checks run in the background, and you can stop them, and carry on later.
A note on the numbers
These figures come from one library, scanned with the program that is now being turned into the six Repair My Music tools, and your library will have a different mix. The point is the shape: a few hundred files that fail, and tens of thousands that are merely untidy.
The six tools will be sold separately, with a bundle. Join the waiting list and we will email you once, when they open.