Every Single Score I Open Becomes Corrupted and Unopenable

• May 18, 2021 - 10:25

I think this is a little self-explanatory.

Basically every time I open or make a score, once I close it it becomes unopenable and says it's "corrupted". This has happened to four scores now and I don't want to open/ruin any more. They only work the first time I open them. For two of these I managed to export them as MP3s but after they finished exporting they either just said they were corrupted or only small bits of the song would play and then it would have a ton of silence.

Is there any way to fix this?


Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

This isn't happening because of note lengths or anything like that. I've had to fix corrupted files like that before so I specifically checked for that. It seems to happen when I save a score. I would link one of my scores here so you can see what I'm talking about but I don't want it to start happening to anyone else.

In reply to by jeetee

Here's one of the scores it happened to. (Pardon the file size, I needed to make it repeat a lot. It's for a project I'm working on and really only the MP3 matters.) From my experience if you open it then it will probably do one of three things:
1. It won't open at all.
2. It will open, but once you save it it will not open again.
3. It will work just fine which means it's probably something wrong on my end.
And for the record I know the file size isn't what's breaking it as this happened to a much shorter score as well.
I would also attach the MP3, but I already deleted it and it was saved on my flash drive so it didn't go to the recycle bin and I have no way to restore it. Just know that the MP3 said that the "File may have been corrupted or is unsupported".

Attachment Size
Macabre Woods.mscz 28.17 KB

In reply to by Tobias Hysell

If this is somehow tied to your musescore settings (which I doubt) then you could try a reset to factory defaults of the software to see if that clears it up.

The next thing to try would be to (first and foremost) create a copy of your existing scores. Then try opening one and "Save As" it to a new file, rather than "Save"/overwrite the current one.

Is there anything specific towards the location you're saving the file into? A system folder, different user folder, cloud synched, network storage, .... ?

In reply to by Tobias Hysell

Musescore wouldn't open at all so I just reinstalled it and it ended up working. The files that I already saved over wouldn't open, but everything else opened and saved and reopened just fine. I also did some tests using some really long scores with multiple parts and tried both the save and save as buttons. All of the test scores still opened fine, so I guess I fixed it.

Thank you so much for helping out by the way. I filled out the Google Forms thing in the forum link you sent about the bug so they know all that was happening, although now that I fixed it I don't know how much of a help I'll be.

In reply to by Tobias Hysell

When you say it "happens" to every single song you save, do you mean, you open the score and it's not yet corrupted, you then perform some unspecified editing operations, then save, and now it's corrupted the next time you load it?

If so, please attach one such not-yet-corrupted score and tell us the exact set of editing steps you are following that lead it to get corrupted. Then we can begin to investigate.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Here's a finished version of the score I linked above where I basically remade the entire song.

What was happening was I would be working on the score like normal (so adding notes and whatnot), and then I would use the save button (not save as since I already had it saved as something) and save it to my flashdrive. I would then export it to an MP3 and it wouldn't export properly. I would try closing Musescore and opening the score back up only for it to say the file was corrupted. Eventually I uninstalled and reinstalled Musescore, and while my files weren't corrupting, they still wouldn't export to MP3s and the files that already were corrupted still wouldn't open. I then started saving everything to my desktop instead of my flashdrive and everything started working fine.

Again, the file I linked with this post is an uncorrupted remake of the corrupted score I linked above. They are almost exactly the same other than the one below being saved to my desktop instead of my flashdrive.

Attachment Size
Macabre Forest.mscz 27.95 KB

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I just saved it to a flashdrive/exported it as an MP3 (sample rate: 48000 Hz and bitrate: 320 kBit/s). The MP3 didn't work and once I closed the score it wouldn't open again.

Maybe try having it repeat a few more times though (maybe two more). I might have removed some of the repeats because I was worried file size was one of the issues.

In reply to by Tobias Hysell

What computer are you on? Mac or PC? We had a similar problem with another program many years ago. It was the storage medium. The drive had become very fragmented. A complete reformatting of the drive solved the problem. Flashdrives deteriorate, significantly, over time. If yours has lost too many sectors, it may still show lots of space, but is in fact not working. Try DiscDoctor to get a full image of the state of the drive.

In reply to by Tobias Hysell

So, are you saying the steps that we should to reproduce a problem are these:

1) load score
2) file / export
3) choose MP3 as file type
4) export
5) close score without saving
6) reopen score

I tried this and had no problems, also, the MP3 played fine. I tried again but saving the score after step 4, also, no problems.

Does sound like your drive is probably failing, but that wouldn't explain an actual corruption in the score data as in the score you posted earlier., Failing hard drives don't result in random measures with the wrong number of beats - they result in completely unreadable files.

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