What would cause mp3tofid to corrupt files?

For the record, I can't be sure that it's mp3tofid corrupting the files because it doesn't actually do anything with them, but something very strange is happening. I run a script on the empeg and it synchronizes the appropriate folders with rsync, transferring the original files; not the symlinks. The problem is - at least half of the files report "Invalid File Format" when selected on the player and do not work. If I were to sync the exact same source files with jemplode, they would work just fine. So what gives, here? Possible that I'm doing something wrong with mp3tofid? I'm running it on my Mac, perhaps I should try a legitimate Linux box? For what it's worth, it seems to be whole albums and not just random tracks; i.e. the whole album plays, or the whole album doesn't. Not sure if that's just a coincidence or not. I would post a log, but it's not much to see. Any thoughts?

It would be interesting to examine the problem files directly on the empeg disk, for instance, comparing them to the corresponding ones on your hard disk.

Question: Does your empeg have two drives? Is the rsync process separating the file information fid from the MP3 contents fid? (I seem to recall the two were expected to be a pair, residing on the same drive.)

Nah. The player doesn't care.

I'm thinking that somewhere along the line, the files are changing ever so slightly and corrupting. I've shrunken my experimentation down to a handful of albums of mixed functionality. I'm running some tests on them with different encoders to see if perhaps that makes a difference. They're all mp3. I check the tag file generated by mp3tofid and even the dead files have "codec=mp3" in them. I'm stumped.

Tony, I'll compare the two files to see if something changes somehow.

Yeah, because if MP3toFID isn't actually changing the contents of the files (just renaming them), then the corruption has to be ocurring on the transfer or on the empeg hard disk.

But maybe the MP3 files are fine, and the problem is some sort of an issue of a mismatch between the index FIDs and MP3s. For instance, you copy all the files to the empeg and somehow there is a file there that is a playlist FID and the index FID of the same name expects it to be an MP3. Something like that.

Just copy the file back and compare with the original?

For what it's worth, I think it was poorly encoded files. I simply re-encoded a few albums' worth of 'bad' files, re-ran mp3tofid and the "Invalid File Format" issue disappeared. So far, I'm really loving this setup. Much more convenient than anything else.