media file checker/scanner program
 

I recently had an hd issue that caused a a lot of corruptions across lots of data, mostly video's and mp3's (all legal). Some files are slightly corrupted resulting in audio skipping or video bluring, however others are just fine. I have a lot of mp3's, several days worth (Once again all legal, mostly from free mp3 sites and some purchased from various companies), I do not have the time or patience to sit there and listen to each and every one to check if it is good or bad. I need a program that can simply scan the file and tell me if it has corruptions or not. I tried mplayer and it does what I want when used in a script, however it actually plays the whole file, this is a waste of time as I have to wait days for it to finish. I need something that does not take play-time, simply read-check time.

Audio is the priority, ability to do this on video would be nice as well.

You're not going to like this answer, but just something to consider if it ever happens again in the future: There are different file integrity checking software you can use to tell if a directory and its contents (files) have changed (size, modified time, checksums, etc.) since the last time you checked. (And you keep the integrity database on another machine or media so it's not at risk for being damaged.)

This is normally used for security purposes, but it might also suit someone like you for future similar situations. You'd simply run the check and you'd quickly know what was damaged.

For FreeBSD I use mtree; for GNU/Linux I use aide.

Anyway, good luck. Sounds like a horrible pain. Maybe someone else will have the right answer for you.

Wow this suddenly got even more painful, I had such a database (list of all files + md5sum), on a different computer, but that was wiped out just prior to this.. basically this all started when my main system (which had the database) had an hd and sata controller failure, I do not know weather it was the hd or the controll that failed first, but they were both trash. I sent the drive in for rma, while waiting I decided to try and add some redundancy to my 'stuff' directory. I created a raid 5 and moved all my data to it, after deleting the data from it's old location I found that the motherboard on that system had some defects, basically they are not noticable in regular use, but when I activate the raid it has errors in reading and writing the data, I had to repair the filesystem and a lot of files were glitchy, I replaced the motherboard and the problem no longer occurs, but the occasional corruptions are there. I had 703gb of data in that collection, and backups for all but 220gb of it. that 220gb is the stuff I need to try and sort through. 150gb of that is video, and I can probably sort that ok, the rest is mp3... do the math, listening to them all is not an option.... I think I am going to have to delete the stuff I I may never need and listen to the rest.