MM winding down?

[swanstuff]

I have the gold licence, and am using

Over a number of years, I've found MM to be easily the best such product available for ripping, tagging, and playing my extensive music collection.

In the last few months, however, I've noticed a gradual loss of functionality which means that MM is no longer usable for the first of these three tasks, inconsistent for the second, and less enjoyable for the last.

The main issues have included:

1) Inability to fetch CD information from the web.
2) Inability to rip CDs - my gold licence copy says it is unable to access a file that it wants on my C drive, even though I save all my music to an external drive. Meanwhile, my free copies on other machines say they no longer support saving into MP3 format.
3) It's nice to play music while doing other things on this PC, but from time to time, MM will come to the foreground in an annoying small window (postcard sized) that breaks in two if you try to move it out of the way, and stays on top of my work unless I click the "-" button. Then, once "-" is clicked (like now), MM keeps playing, but there's no way to get back to the MM window: it will just keep on playing what's in its playlist, but I can't amend that list, add items, change the volume, pause it, or anything. Even the Task Manager doesn't show it, nor will Alt+Tab toggle to it, and there's no MM in the taskbar.

Now, I am aware that I am using an old PC with Windows XP, and that this remains unsupported. However, I haven't messed with anything, and I would prefer not to spend out on something else when MM has worked perfectly on this machine. Furthermore, this is the one with the gold licence, and I guess I'd have to buy a new "lifetime" licence if I want to put MM on another machine.

I've raised issues (1) & (2) on here before, but none of the suggestions solved the problem, so I've accepted that my MM is broken. I haven't asked about (3) as it's a mere annoyance, and if that was all that was wrong, I'd live with it.

So may I ask for some advice please. Which of these options would be best?

1) Is it worth buying a whole new PC with Windows 8 or 10, just to run MM? Will I also have to buy a new gold licence? Is MM on its way out anyway, as I don't want to throw money at a failing system?

2) Might it be possible to re-install MM, or could there be a global fix on its way that will clear up these near-fatal issues?

3) Should I just cut my losses, and use the deeply flawed (but still working) Windows Media Player to convert CDs to whatever format it wants, THEN convert those to MP3s using third party software, and tag them all by hand? That sounds like a dog-and-bark-yourself situation, but it's the only one I can think of that won't cost.

Thank you for any assistance available.

[swanstuff]

Sorry - I meant to fill in the gaps at the top before Sending:

I'm using MM version 4.1.4.1709, and I have purchased a Lifetime Gold licence for this copy, although copies on my other machines are the free version.

[Lowlander]

No such issues with MediaMonkey on Windows XP or Windows 10. So no MediaMonkey isn't winding down, you're experiencing problems which are either bugs in MediaMonkey affecting your environment or bugs in your environment affecting MediaMonkey.

1) For Auto-Tag from Web you were told the problem is that you're using a third party Addon, not one of the MediaMonkey Amazon options which still work. So that can easily be fixed by switching to an Amazon source using Options.

2) Note that the free version comes with a 30 day limit on conversion to MP3 (due to license costs), but other formats will still work: http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/inde ... -unlimited As far as the error it's Windows restricting access to the folder, that can easily be fixed by increasing rights or changing the MediaMonkey Temp folder to a location where you (MediaMonkey) has more rights.

[rovingcowboy]

troubles with xp might be from ms., they like to cause issues to old versions, won't admit it but always seems to happen starting with a new version on the horizon, then again you might be infected with malware if you don't keep the anti virus and anti malware updated, but on the idea that you are good in those areas then not getting the info from the web any longer is more likely because the web site hosts are removing ie codes since windows 10 no longer has ie and it has been replaced by ms with edge their new browser, I'm having trouble with my ie on sites also, and ms is even messing with outlook and email again,
I'd get the firefox browser if I was you and use it. might even find an 500 dollar win 7 machine to use online and keep the xp offline, you can always add the songs in to the win 7 then get all info on the tags, then move to the xp that is what I do.

but the cd ripping not working might be the cd drive needs updated drivers or more likely background programs hogging the cpu which is by now old and really slow anyway, so you would benefit from getting the "Bill2s program manager" it's a French program so look for the British or American flag to get English on the site and in the program after you install it.
then go through and adjust the prioritys of the processes to be faster for the ones you use. just keep all system processes at normal windows in xp was really touchy about messing with the windows ones. then you should be fine when you set mm's exe to higher or realtime if you only play music, higher if you want to use it at the same time.
go to analogx and get his ram cleaner,
make sure you use an automatic registry cleaner and automatic system defragmentor music playing will fragment the hd fast.

[toyzrme]

How old is your PC?

How old is your hard drive?

Hard drives can start failing at any time, but rarely last longer than 6-7 years (depending on useage, of course). A store-bought XP machine with its original HDD would be at least 9 years old (Vista was released January, 2007).

Often, it starts with the PC having a hard time reading one sector, then grows to more sectors. It will try for up to 2000 times, or 2 minutes sometimes, to read each of those bad sectors, so you will often notice the PC slowing down gradually over time, if this is the case (i.e. eventually it gets the read, but it takes 100x, then 200x, then 500x, etc. before it succeeds - no error message). Or, it might not get the sector at all - now you're starting to lose data.

I would run a disk test ASAP. CHKDSK is ok, I use SpinRite (which actually will refresh all the bits on the disk surface by inverting them all twice, and attempt statistical error recovery of unreadable sectors - not a final solution, but buys you time - Google if curious).

In any case, make sure you have a backup of your precious library!

[monkey hi fi]

I know what you are saying about hd's failing but there are always the good ones that were made to last, I've got Max,, and westerndig.. and they were got with win 98se they are still in use in my xp back up system and in the dell xp system they are 17 and 15 yrs old still working the surface scan doesn't find anything wrong. so there are some good ones out there for the old xp's but I admit electronics are a fickle thing.

roving cowboy / keith hall / monkey hi fi

[toyzrme]

That's awesome - a couple of years ago I had to finally retire a friend's 8GB 5 1/4 disk (yes, 5.25, and about 3-4 inches tall - for 8GB) from a 1998 Aptiva - so it was roughly 14-15 years old. Of course, it was slow as a dog by then...

Just one warning: IDE drives now do a lot of surface cleaning on their own, without reporting an error. So a diskscan can come out clean, even though thousands of bad sectors are found and relocated by the hardware, without letting the OS know. Only if the embedded electronics CAN'T recover a sector, does the OS even hear about it. This is good and bad: the drive just keeps working - right up until it dies hard, with completely unrecoverable sectors.

Google & BackBlaze's disk life expectancy reports are a fascinating read, if you haven't seen them - there's a real spike in deaths in the first year ("infant mortality"), then it's low, until it starts picking up in the 4/5th year, and heads north from there.