A couple of months ago, I ripped a selection of albums from YouTube as MP3s, put them all on a USB stick, and plugged that into the socket on my car. Cars these days seem to recognise external drives and happily play music from them.
But most of the albums have degraded. They judder, and skip, as if remixed by a devotee of early 2000s electronica.
Is there something about cheap USB drives which reacts badly to being plugged into an internal combustion engine? Would reformatting and reloading the music onto the drive be anything other than a temporary solution? And before I do anything else, is there any chance that the problem is associated with something other than the USB drive itself?
If they’re really cheap USB drives, then it could simply be dodgy flash memory which is just failing. Or, if you got it on eBay or amazon, it might be counterfeit and not actually have the stated capacity.
There are different types of flash memory, and the type that they put into cheap USB sticks is generally the worst of the bunch. That said, you shouldn’t be getting that much data corruption after only a couple of months.
If you are leaving the USB stick in the car, the wide temperature extremes that a car goes through could be causing a lot of your data corruption and could be damaging your USB drive. Keep the USB stick with you so that it doesn’t go through such temperature extremes and the data should remain intact a lot longer.
It’s also possible that there is something wrong with your car stereo that is causing the problem, like the USB voltage being out of spec or being noisy due to poor voltage filtering.
London’s roads are impressively pot-holed, and the car is designed for smooth, sleek, German autobahns, so leaps in startled outrage every time it encounters an uneven surface.
It’s been very, very cold - by our standards - lately, as well.
And the USB sticks I used were given away as press packs at an exhibition.
So. Use more expensive sticks, take them out of the car when not in use, and drive more sedately.
Thank you. This is the sort of thing that I hoped this board might be useful for.
In my role as tech support, I’ve often reminded people that USB drives are volatile and will eventually fail when I discover that they are using them as their sole backup source. People tend to put a lot more faith in them than they deserve.
This one. They each cost in the dozens of cents in total for the acts of assembly, shipping across oceans, and screen printing with a logo. The first thing cut to hit that price is the quality of the memory chips inside.
Objects left in direct sunlight, inside of a car could possibly get that hot - without airflow to carry heat away.
But I’ve never heard of flash memory degrading in the way that the OP describes - for the music to skip just a little bit, that means the files themselves are still readable.
IMO, it seems more likely that something has gone wrong in a way that affects transfer bit rate - so maybe a fault in the interface of the USB stick, or maybe of the stereo, rather than the memory.
One way to test this: if you copy one of the affected song files onto a PC, does it play OK? Because if it’s a corrupted file, it should fail to play. Do the affected songs always skip at the same point every time you play them?
That’s a very interesting question. Let me try that and report back. But yes, they always go at the same point. All the files are saved as entire albums, and in each case they break down and become unlistenable at a certain point.
This is just a reminder to keep all discussions on the legal side of the line, please.
Where the music came from isn’t relevant to the topic at hand, which is USB stick data degradation. Let’s focus on that and not have any more discussions about illegally obtaining music from youtube (or any other source).
What exactly do you mean when you say the files are saved as entire albums? One huge .mp3 for each album? Or do you mean each album has its own folder with separate .mp3 files? Or, though unlikely, are you using an .m3u playlist file?
I’m guessing one huge .mp3 for each album. That could be problematic on some media players, as could whatever method you originally used to create those huge .mp3 files. You should try checking your .mp3 files for errors, it’s easy.
But I’m not clear on one other important detail: Were all these albums that eventually have problems previously playing perfectly in the car and only degraded over time through repeated plays, or are you saying the albums each degrade at the same point every time you’ve played them in the car?
*Automatic *Cloud backup plus an *automatic *incremental backup to an HDD that is *internal *to the computer plus source code repository.
Well, that’s what I do, but hear me out :
a. A backup you didn’t make is useless, so it needs to be automatic
b. Since it’s automatic, you shouldn’t have to plug something in to your computer, so I use a 4 TB internal drive for backups. Tougher if you have a laptop though some have the room inside for 2 drives.
c. The main drive can fail at any time. So you should store a recovery image of the drive, made automatically.
d. Something can happen to physically destroy your computer at any time. Or even your whole house. So you should store a copy to the cloud of your data, automatically.
e. Software source code, if you’re a developer, is worth way more than everything else, so you should use repositories and then push milestones to github or an internal server network if you work for a large company.
This is a neat little summary of the realities of backup. It was written by a colleague of mine many years ago as he set out to found a company that sold backup software.
(You will discover that the end of the summary includes references to this now defunct company name and links to a totally different company that now owns the domain name. The software company he founded was enormously successful and he eventually sold it. It still exists.)
My simple view is that all your computers are caches. At any time you should be able to survive total destruction of any and all of your computer gear, and you should be able to survive arbitrary long term malicious corruption of data on your computers. Archiving is not the same as backup, which is no the same as version control. You need all of them.
There are quite a few backup “rules”. One “rule” is, if it’s on your machine it doesn’t count as a backup .
Another “rule” is, if you make a backup and then keep it in the same building as your machine, that doesn’t count either.
But you know what? “Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good” is a more important rule than either of those. Any backup is better than no backup. And two backups are better than one.