I need to know how to handle unpack a music archive that spans several RAR files. It's a discography for a band I like. The file names follow the pattern [bandname].part001.rar, [bandname].part002.rar, [bandname].part003.rar, etc. I'm used to situations where there is a single RAR that can be easily unapacked via RarZilla and then yields playable files but I don't know what to do when there are multiple RAR files. Do I need to first join the different RAR files together to make a single big RAR, and then use RarZilla? If so, what tool do I use to combine the RARs? I've tried using RarZilla on the individual RARs but that inevitably failes. In one of the two archives, the unRar operation fails right away without creating any new files, just an empty folder. In the other archive, each of the RARs unpacks to the 29% mark, then fails. The folder then contains part of an MP3. Your help would be appreciated!
I just tried both of them again but got the same behaviour. Are there any alternatives under these circumstances or should I give up on unpacking these archives?
In this circumstance, you need to select them all together (Ctrl+A) and right click one of the selected. If they were .rar & .r01/2/3 etc then you would just extract from the .rar file.
Selecting them all and right-clicking one of them but it failed the same as the previous attempts. In other words, the one that failed at 29% previously failed at 29% with this technique and the one that failed right at the beginning previously also failed at the beginning with the new technique. Is there a better tool than Rarzilla for this job? I'm on Windows XP SP3. I had assumed this was a routine question but if two "AfterDawn Addicts" are both giving me advice that isn't working I can't help but wonder why I'm having so much trouble. Is this an unusual way to set up a music archive with multiple RARs? Or has the person who created the archive possibly messed it up in some way?
Hopefully, the rar files are not corrupt but I think that is your problem. The massive libs I have seen each compressed file didn't need any other file to unpack it. If 1 of the 3 couldn't unpack you still had 2/3ds of the music. You could try to use a 'fix' utility to salvage what you can.
Check all files are named the same with the correct numbering i.e name.rar.001 name.rar.002 & not name.rar.001 name.rar..002 = 2 full stops not just one or some other such naming sequence,then there's also what comments there were at the site you downloaded from & whether anyone mentioned issues
Like Mez said, it sound as if the archives are corrupted; presumably you don't get any error prompts or such? WinRAR itself has a repair option but I've never had use for it, so that's where my knowledge stops. I personally use 7zip for all extracting, might be worth a try.
The repair can't really repair corruption, it just removes references to data that is lost by corruption so that you can get what was not damaged. If you did download the files, know that one of the ploys used by anti-piracy apps is to foul your download with garbage. utorrent is the best app for discovering and correcting the problem. If you were not using it you might want to re-DL the torrent. After a little time, you can stop the process, shut down utorrent copy in the bad files to the new location then start the process up again. Utorrent will verify the contents. If you had used utorrent try to re-verify your files. If that doesn't work the corruption has been there for a very long time.
I tried using Rarzilla to unpack the first few of the RARs in one archive and each effort failed at the 29% mark. Each of the folders had the same songs in it; for example I'm Free (it's an archive of Who albums). I'm not sure if the songs are complete though: I'm Free ends very abruptly but it's the version from the movie Tommy so I'm not sure if that is accurate; the studio version definitely doesn't end that way. Where would I find this "fix" utility?
Im not seeing and double stops or any other dubious aspects to the naming sequence; it all seems the way it should be - except that I dont see why there are multiple RAR files in the first place....
No, there are no error prompts as such, just the usual Rarzilla notification that unpacking could not proceed for several possible reasons. I tried extracting with 7Zip but it failed in just 4 seconds with the message "cannot open [my long file name] as archive". Is it supposed to be able to unRAR a RAR file?
Yes 7zip supports .rar files. Like Mez said, if the archived are corrupted, even with a "repair" it doesn't technically fix it, merely overlooks what is corrupt and tries to extract the files that are complete. Try using the free trial of WinRAR.. WinRAR x86 (32 bit) 4.11 Browse the the archive locations, select them all and press Alt+R (off the top of my head).
From your description the rar files are corrupt. Usually, only complete files come out of a compressed file. The unpack will fail before it will unpack something less than what was packed. There is no way to know that the files were all complete before they were packed. If you are suspicious there is a tool in the top post (audio tester) that will give you a quick quality report. It is sensitive to missing audio frames. You would be surprised how much (not fresh ripped) audio will fail the test.
