What exactly is destroying a great Music Browser?

[sallenmd87]

Are you perchance using a portable install.

I've been having similar problems for months. I upgrade every time a new MM4 version is available. I keep MM4 and my entire 2.9 TB library of 240,000 tracks on an external 4TB SSD. My DB file is 1.2 GB. Though paused now due to coronavirus, I travel a lot on business, about 20 trips for 100+ nights per year. I like to have all my music with me. Currently running MM on my home desktop and on a laptop when at the office or on the road. BOth runnling fully-updated Win 10.

MM has been randomly doing the following on both computers: freezing; corrupting the MediaMonkey.ini file, corrupting or deleting tracks and on occasion damaging the database. On start up this morning, it emptied the database of all playlists, etc. When I shut it down last night all was well. On startup this morning—poof! Thankfully, I had backed the data base up last night right after closing MM and before shutting the computer down, because I had made a lot of changes.

I'ave become so paranoid that I have an extreme backup strategy. I back up the database and the ini files every time i close MM. Every evening, I do a differential backup of the entire 4TB drive onto an 8TB external drive using fancy backup software that I bought because MM is so unreliable.

I've contemplated switching to MusicBee, but I have far too much time invested in more than 200 AutoPlaylists that would not be transferrable. Very disappointed at this point.

[Peke]

Hi,
I do not use it daily, but I have one installation on 1TB USB 3.1 NVMe drive and never had issues like yours.

Are you sure that MM didn't used different DB?

INI file can get corrupted due the difference in system settings. We are addressing this in MM5 where it is planned to make portable mode more useful.

[Lowlander]

No issue running portable here for many years. The problem is likely caused by the external drive setup. Perhaps the drive is sleeping and taking to long respond, becomes temporarily disconnected, has a bad cable, bad port or a failing drive.

Losing access while MediaMonkey is writing to database file could account for corruption and not being able to access it for the empty Library.

[sallenmd87]

I have no other read/write problems with this Samsung 860 PRO drive. It is a professional-grade, heavy-duty, extended life drive. Only with MediaMonkey. I had the same MediaMonkey-only problem with the previous drive with a different cable. And I never use cheap garbage cables. I'll upgrade the housing on the off chance that there's a problem with that, but as I said, the problem also occurred with the predecessor mechanical drive that I still use problem-free for other things.

[Lowlander]

As you're home, have you tried running MediaMonkey itself of a local drive (as it's Portable you should be able to move the whole install folder there) and see if this proves more reliable?

[sallenmd87]

I'll give that a try. I wish I could figure out a way to run synchronized version of MM4 on two computers and just keep the music files on the portable drive. The wone thing that the drives I've had problems with is that they are SATA III drives in USB-C enclosures connected to USB-C ports on three computers.