What's rummaging in my mp3 library?
December 9, 2011 1:59 PM Subscribe
What process is modifying my .mp3s in the middle of the night?
My mp3 library is on my PC hard drive, sorted by artist folders with album sub-folders. On 11/22, I upgraded to Win7, and imported the audio folder from my backup drive onto my freshly formatted primary. A vast majority of my artist sub-folders have a 'last modified' date of 11/22, which makes sense. However, I've noticed that over the last couple of nights, about 15 of these directories (out of nearly 900) showed modification times within the last day or so, usually between the hours of midnight and 4am or so. Checking in the subfolders, it's usually just one or two files that has a recent modification date - the rest of the album will still be set at 11/22. And it's not albums I've played recently.
I play my music through MediaMonkey, which is set up to have tracks manually added to the library (not auto-synced). I've got Windows Media Center set to share my audio with my network, but some of these changes predate my getting WMC set up, so I don't think that's it. My virus scanner (AVG) hasn't found anything weird, and the scans themselves don't take place at times which coincide with the modification timestamps.
Any idea what could be causing these modifications? Is there a mod log that I can check to see what's active at those times? Basically, is this something to worry about?
My mp3 library is on my PC hard drive, sorted by artist folders with album sub-folders. On 11/22, I upgraded to Win7, and imported the audio folder from my backup drive onto my freshly formatted primary. A vast majority of my artist sub-folders have a 'last modified' date of 11/22, which makes sense. However, I've noticed that over the last couple of nights, about 15 of these directories (out of nearly 900) showed modification times within the last day or so, usually between the hours of midnight and 4am or so. Checking in the subfolders, it's usually just one or two files that has a recent modification date - the rest of the album will still be set at 11/22. And it's not albums I've played recently.
I play my music through MediaMonkey, which is set up to have tracks manually added to the library (not auto-synced). I've got Windows Media Center set to share my audio with my network, but some of these changes predate my getting WMC set up, so I don't think that's it. My virus scanner (AVG) hasn't found anything weird, and the scans themselves don't take place at times which coincide with the modification timestamps.
Any idea what could be causing these modifications? Is there a mod log that I can check to see what's active at those times? Basically, is this something to worry about?
Response by poster: Hmmm - that might be it, but I've been running MM on this library for years now and it hasn't done this before. I keep all my id3 info standardized with Tag&Rename, but these are all files that had been formatted ages ago.
posted by FatherDagon at 4:00 PM on December 9, 2011
posted by FatherDagon at 4:00 PM on December 9, 2011
Procmon might tell you. Set it up to filter on a Path containing the name of your media folder, and an Operation of Write, and you should be able to see the name of any executable that has written to any file inside that folder during a Procmon run.
The only thing is I'm not sure how long you can leave Procmon go before it eats all your available RAM. But at least you could try.
posted by flabdablet at 5:37 AM on December 10, 2011
The only thing is I'm not sure how long you can leave Procmon go before it eats all your available RAM. But at least you could try.
posted by flabdablet at 5:37 AM on December 10, 2011
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posted by empath at 2:07 PM on December 9, 2011