I just installed the latest svn version of amarok a couple days ago..  As usual, no problems.  After installing it - it asked to rescan the music for ATF. I said sure.. I have about 80 gigs of music stored on another machine in the other room.  Well - it took almost 2 days to rescan.  I wasnt sure this was normal, but it did say A LONG TIME.  Anyway, a couple days after rescanning I began to notice some music sounding weird. I.e. corrupt.  I thought maybe it was a coincidence and just deleted and restored the music. I didnt play much music until today.  Ive found so far one out of every 3 albums or so are corrupt.  This is music that I have listened to many times, and I know were fine previously..  You know what corruption Im talking about  - the sound of a tape being eaten by a tape player.. Its awful, and im hoping i dont have to go through all of my music to start fumbling for which is good and bad now.  None of my music was EVER corrupt before - im fairly careful and meticulous about it. Some of it is not backed up!!    Could amarok have cause this problem?? IT sure seems it did.

Wow.. no responses?  This does not seem to be an isolated event.. The same thing has happened to some of the music at work where I use amarok..

Check the modification times for the corrupted songs. If it hasn't been changed for a while then it is likely to be a hardware problem, otherwise it could be a Amarok  issue (although I have never heard about stuff like this happening)

I did have the same problem few days ago as i was upgrading my current version of amarok (1.4.1) to svn.  It enabled ATF (by default) as it scans my entire collection (about 50 gig of music (ogg and some mp3).  After a long time scanning my collection (about 5 hours), it finally stops and i was able to listen again to my music.  That's when i heard the second song amarok's was playing began to played bizarre.  I skip it and the other song refused to play!  Almost all the songs were corrupted or refused to play.  Modifications were made on the date of the songs at the same time that amarok scanned my collection for ATF tagging.  I found no trace of that big on that forum nor kde's bug.  I tired to talk to people on IRC's amarok channel and nobody was able to help.
Now that someone else had that problem, i think it could be a serious problem if other people have this problem with amarok and ATF tagging.  I didn't want to enable this feature, but it started on his own.  Imagine someone who don't do backup of his collection and have this problem!  Thanks to my external HD! 

(sorry for my english as i am quebecois)

I filed this bug report some time ago:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131353

I still have not found a way to repair the corrupted files.
And I keep my music files on a read-only partition since them, as I lost some trust in svn version of amarok (which is clearly a bad thing). Just to add, I never indented to use ATF at the moment, but like for Danny it started out of the blue applying ATF the feature to my collection although it was disabled in the config (but this was clearly a now fixed bug in svn).

Hi,
I "upgraded" to 1.4.2_beta1, switched on ATF as it said it was safe, and now I have a large collection of corrupted mp3 files with the horrible mangled tape noises as described by the first poster. If anyone knows how to repair the damage, I'd be very grateful!

Great.. alot of my music I am going to be unable to replace.. The stupid ATF came on automatically for me also after upgrading.  Now ALOT of my music is wrecked!!!!!!!!!!  What a major clusterf*ck this is.  Its more than just a 'bug' its an extremely serious problem.

Could all of you for who ATF became enabled automatically, please report what exact version of Amarok you have been using at that time?
And could you please detail what kind of files have been corrupted? (E.g. mp3 or ogg, id3v1 or id3v2.3 tags on the old file, ...)

Thank you for helping!

What is ATF?

ATF=Advanced Tagging Feature. See Wiki for details

I have (as far as I can tell) only corrupted ogg files. I added details to a bug report (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131353), I believe the svn version with automatic enabled ATF (although the config menu said "disabled") was from 2006-07-24. However, in my case I quit amarok before it had finished rescanning my whole collection. I have about 60 broken ogg files which is a big fraction from all of my oggs. As I said in the bug report, I am happy to provide some of the broken files to the devs for analysis.

Is this problem present in 1.4.1-beta1?

I guess not (but I have not tested it), but the latest SVN checkouts were fine (no automatic ATF activation). Of course, I cannot speak for problems with the ATF adaption process.

Yep me too.  100+ gigs of music i've been collecting for 10 years, irreplacable recordings of friends' bands et c.  Unlistenably corrupt.  This is -really- bad guys.  I mean, really bad, i've been using linux for at least 8 or 9 years and this is making me seriously consider switching.  I think this is the kind of thing anti-linux people will hear about and really put them off using it.  I certainly can't bring myself to use amaroK any more dispite being completely loyal since it came out.  Please please, please, if anyone comes up with a way to restore these files...

1) ATF does not come on by default.  It has *always* been set to a default of off, even in SVN.
2) This is the first I've ever heard of mp3 corruption.  I have heard (very recently) of ogg corruption.  The ogg corruption is caused by an undetermined bug in taglib, the library Amarok uses for tagging.  As of now ogg tag writing is turned off in SVN as a result.  If someone would like to send me a corrupted mp3 file I can look at it.  The ogg corruption is being delved into by the writer of taglib and myself.
3) Corrupted oggs are probably not restorable.  This is due to the stream-based structure of oggs, which means that the metadata is not entirely separate from the song data.  This is also why I'd be very surprised if you found mp3s that were corrupted -- if you look at which files they are I'll bet you will find that the ones that are corrupted are oggs.  If we find a way to restore them, believe me, we will make it known.  In the meantime we have disallowed ATF for oggs.
4) I cannot fathom how a bug in a piece of software is either a surprise to a linux user, or would make them switch after using it for 8 or 9 years.  Regardless, we all do our best to be safe when programming, and we're very sorry you're having issues, but as always, some things are unforseen.  The taglib ogg libraries have not really changed since version 1.0 of taglib, and it is entirely possible that it is not until some functions of it have been getting used on such a massive scale (such as people writing tags to every ogg in their collection) that this bug has surfaced.
5) If any of you are willing to (sanely and rationally) work with us to try to figure out WTF is causing this ogg corruption, please let me know.  It would help to have someone run some checks on the corrupted files (and also on the non-corrupted files).

FYI, here is a relevant bug report, linked straight to my comment that has a breakdown of what's happening.  We're still working on the *why*

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131353#c16