Rebuilding a corrupted Songs.mdb database after electrical storm

[kedmison]

Was in the process of building song book. When I looked at the song book .RTF files it shows 75% of my titles with the artist "1 Giant Leap & Maxi, Jazz & Robbie Williams." Have no idea where this artist name has come from or why it has replaced all the artist' names in my database. What has happend???


Also just looked in the access data file. That artist name plus "All Star Tribute w/vocal" is also showing up on many titles.

Thanks,
Kelly

[kedmison]

I have checked the access database and I am correct the data has changed the artist to the two artist I mentioned in my previous post. The titles are all correct and the song ID#'s are all correct. Looks like I'm faced with either re importing all my discs or finding a way to correct the data under artists. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Kelly

[kedmison]

Been up late but was able to convert the data base to access 2000. Corrected the problem pasting from my excell file. And then I changed the data base back to access 97. Will put it back in Hoster in the morning and see what happens. thank MTU for this forum. If you read through it, you will usually find someone been "down that road" before. I'll post the results tomorrow.

Kelly

[admin]

Never heard of this before. I suspect it was your Songs.mdb that got corrupted somehow. Please do the following:

1. Save a copy of your newly rebuild Songs.mdb database under a new name, say Songs-mine.mbd.

2. Click the Tools menu Build Songs Database command. This will go out to the header for each .KMA file and pull the Artist and Song names.

3. When it is built, review the Songs.mdb database entries in the Playlist tab (not Songbook) to see if the Artists are normal. If they are, your KMA files are OK. If they are not... you need to run two commands before you import any more songs. I'll tell you what they are IF you need to when you post your results.

4. Post your results back here.

5. If you need to use Hoster today, rename your Songs-mine.mdb database back to Songs.mdb and run your show. However, you need to solve this problem for good. Post your results here so we can get you fixed up.

[kedmison]

It didn't work guys. Hoster plays fine. The Titles are correct. But the corrected data base I put in this morning has reverted back to the problem of yesterday. The only thing I can think of now that possibly corrupted the file to begin with, was while in the middle of rebuilding the song data base through Hoster, we had a electrical storm, power went off and had to reboot. And that was in the middel of Hoster rebuilding the song data base. So,...where do I go from here. Like I said, I have a show tonight but Hoster plays well ID numbers are ok and Titles ok.

Thanks,

Kelly

[kedmison]

Is it possible that the kma header in the song files is messed up. I have a back up of my songs on a portable hard drive. If I were to delete the songs from the laptop top and replaced with those backed up, could that possible correct the error?

Kelly

ADMIN NOTE: Yes! If you have a good copy of your .kma files, replacing any that are suspected to be damage is a valid and simple way to fix them, and THEN run the Tools menu "Build Songs Database" command to rebuild you Songs.mdb database with the new .kma header information.

However, keep in mind that it is not possible for the computer to change more than one .kma file header at a time. However, runniing our "Update KMA File Headers" command will change the Artist and Song names on every .kma file in the Songs.mdb to what is in the Songs.mdb database. Thus... running this command is dangerous if you don't think about what you are doing befroe you run it.

[kedmison]

Ok, here's what happened and maybe this will help someone else.

A couple of days ago I had Hoster print out a song book. I noticed that it duplicated several of the artists rather than keeping them as individual. (Didn't know that you had to delete your artist and title files before you do this) So I thought maybe I needed to rebuild the data base. While in the middle of the data base rebuild, we had an electrical storm and power went of just briefly,..but long enough that the computer shut down and it had to reboot. Well when it came up I had it rebuild again. Then I told Hoster to print books. When I looked at the books 75% of the Artists were gone and in its place were 2 names of a group I didn't even have! I copied my song data base over to my other computer and opened it up. Sure enough the artists were gone. Book ID (Song ID to me) was ok, Titles were ok, but wrong artist.)

I then copied and pasted from my Excell file into the data base file. Hosters uses Access 97, so I first had to change it to 2000 to do these changes then change back to 97. I put the db back in Hoster, told it to rebuild db and no such luck. The db changed back to the corrupted file. Thank goodnees for MTU. Brian got me back on track. Apparently what happend is the damaged was to the header file in the kma's. So,...I did it all over and this time told hoster to rebuild kma's. Perfect! Worked like a charm. But, I then discovered that some songs weren't matching up with the correct artist. Went through and found where I didn't exactly get everything in its place. Took a long time but finally got all my i's dotted and t's crossed. If you have to doing anything to your db file, please go slow and make sure everything is like it's supposed to be. I found half a dozen errors that I didn't realize I had. I know this was long but wanted to share it. Thank goodness other people have shared theirs.

Thanks, MTU, Thanks, Brian.

Kelly