Crash wile scanning Playlist generator - Tried everything, still not figured out.

[Squashed]

We'll probably need to replace it for the next release anyway....

Those are good news (not the fact that it's broken but that it may be replaced). I feared this gem could be dropped at all for some reason and to be honest: IMO this is/was one of the best features of Winamp.

[DirtyHarry]

All the MP3 files which make the playlist generator crash, all play without any issue. So no problem there.

[DJ Egg]

If those same mp3 files cause Winamp to crash when trying to play them,
then chances are that you're experiencing the known in_mp3/id3v2 issue instead.
See the same Known Bugs thread for a link to in_mp3.dll from 5.666 build 3512.

[DirtyHarry]

Thanks for the reply, I'll keep my hopes up for an updated version.
The interesting thing is, with the previous version of Winamp I did not experience any problems with the playlist generator, while the MP3 files that cause the issue were already in my collection at that time. Unfortunately, like I mentioned, I have no idea which version of Winamp I had been using, let alone which version of the playlist generator. It must have been a version >2 years old. Is there anyway of using the latest Winamp version, but using a previous version of the playlist generator plug-in?

[DJ Egg]

Hi

It's a known bug/issue...

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=156839

3. Playlist Generator crashes during scan or Auto-Tag crashes on some files:
We need to update to the latest Gracenote SDK. Big job. Sorry :-(

We'll probably need to replace it for the next release anyway....

[DirtyHarry]

I'm having troubles with the Playlist generator. It crashes every single time, during step 4/4. To be honest, I have little hope that this problem can be easily solved, as I understand that the Playlist generator is a plugin from Gracenote, and that the Winamp developers don't have much influence over it. Nevertheless I will share my experiences here, and the approach that I took to narrow down the problem, in the hope that it might be useful for others, and in the hope that someone might hand me a useful tip.

My situation:
I have quite a large MP3 database (although I think that the term large is very relative on this forum) of ~ 13.000 MP3 files. The database only contains MP3 files, no other media files. MP3 files are sorted by albums, and for each album the tags are checked with Tag&Rename. Up to a few weeks ago, I was able to use the playlist generator without any problem. However, I have recently reinstalled Windows, and with that installed the latest Winamp version. Unfortunately I cannot figure out anymore which version of Winamp I was using before, but it must have been a version that was at least 2 years old (that was at least the time since my previous Windows reinstall).

The problem:
I perform a clean install of the latest version (5.666) of Winamp. No 3rd party plugins. Then I add the folder which contains my MP3 collection to the local library. When this folder is completely scanned, I go to Plugins > Media Library > Nullsoft Playlist Generator v1.8 > Configure selected plug-in and choose Scan to build the database. The plugin starts to do its work, which will take some time. But then during the 4th step, Winamp crashes. This happens every time that I try it. Each time that I perform a test, I reset Winamp to its original state, by replacing the Winamp profile folder (AppData\Roaming\Winamp\) with a copy of the fresh profile folder.

What I have tried:
If have read in other topics that some users were able to identify faulty MP3 files by dividing their collection in halves. And when Winamp crashed while scanning that half of the files, again dividing it in halves etc. Quite a time laborious process. I took a slightly different approach. I used the Process Monitor from Sysinternals. This program allows you to monitor which files Winamp accesses. In Process Monitor, you can set filters so that it only shows processes related to winamp.exe.
Using Process Monitor, I could see that Winamp would each time crash on the same single MP3 file. I could also see that before crashing, there would still be internet traffic to service.gracenote.com. This could sometimes even take something like 15 mins. So for instance, I could see that the last MP3 file was scanned at 22:00, after that only internet activity to service.gracenote.com, while Winamp would finally crash at 22:15 (as example). This long delay between the access to the last MP3 file, and the eventual crash does not happen if I only add a small collection of MP3 files.
At least Process Monitor helped me to narrow down the offending file. As an extra test I have tried to add only this album to the media library (starting again with a fresh profile folder) and scan the library to build the playlist generator. In this case Winamp would indeed crash immediately, which shows that the problem has nothing to do with memory issues. In this case, with adding only a single album, there would also not be a long delay between the scanning of the last file, and the moment that Winamp crashes.

An issue with the MP3 file?
I took a close look at the MP3 file which caused the problem, but could not find any issue with it. Both MP3Val and MP3Diags could not find any problem with the file. The file contains no embedded folder art, and has correct ID3v2 tags. There are also no strange symbols in the filename. I have temporary removed this file from the MP3 collection, and tried again. And also this time, Winamp crashed. And this time, the offending MP3 file came from the same album. So perhaps there is some problem with this complete album?

Re-encoding the files / removing tags.
Since it may actually be a problem associated with this entire album, maybe it's the MP3 encoding, or there is something wrong with the tags. So I tried two things; one folder with the same files, but with all the MP3 tags removed completely (with Tag&Rename), and one folder in which I have re-encoded the MP3 files (Lame). Again, Winamp crashed, in both cases! So it apparently has nothing to do with the MP3 tags, and also reencoding the files did not solve the issue.

So how does the playlist generator work?
From what I read, the playlist generator scans all MP3 files with Gracenote's "music recognition". As I understand, this means that it actually tries to determine which song it is based on the music itself, and does not use the MP3 metadata. Is this correct? Does it also take into account which album a specific song belongs to, or does it evaluate each MP3 file separately? Could it be that, for some reason, specific albums are problematic?

I think that I performed some elaborate tests, which at least helped to rule out a number of issues, but nevertheless did not solve the problem. And I'm out of ideas how to continue. I hope that this topic is helpful for others who experience similar problems, and welcome any feedback or suggestions.

For the sake of completeness I list below the crash log, and the details of my setup:

Setup:
Windows 7 x64, SP1
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E600
RAM: 4 GB

Winamp crash log (only first part);

code:
Winamp client version: 5.66

winamp caused an Access Violation (0xc0000005) 

in module CddbMusicIDWinamp.dll at 0023:0356a550.



Exception handler called in Winamp.

Error occurred at 1/31/2014 22:18:50.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Winamp\winamp.exe, run by Herman.

Operating system:  Windows 7 (6.1.7601).

2 processor(s), type 586.

51% memory in use.

4095 MBytes physical memory.

1968 MBytes physical memory free.

0 MBytes paging file.

0 MBytes paging file free.

0 MBytes user address space.

3892 MBytes user address space free.

Read from location 2ba336ac caused an access violation.



Context:

EDI:    0x75db3e59  ESI: 0x09e894a0  EAX:   0x09d90ef0

EBX:    0x00000000  ECX: 0x03568a0a  EDX:   0x00000000

EIP:    0x0356a550  EBP: 0x043efce0  SegCs: 0x00000023

EFlags: 0x00010213  ESP: 0x043ef94c  SegSs: 0x0000002b



Bytes at CS:EIP:

8b 84 85 0c fe ff ff 3b c3 74 1e 8b 4d 10 8b 09 



Stack:

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0x043efffc: 043efffc