A Plugin Keeps Crashing my PC!

Hi,

I am a songwriter and sing little melodies into my phone all the time, so I have thousands of little .amr files, but I am running out of hard drive space, so I need a more efficient way of keeping them on my PC and other hard drives.

I have been very disorganized and have several copies of each file, so the last few days I have been going through them one by one, renaming them and deleting duplicates.

My old XP PC would not play .AMR files; - I had to convert them first. But this PC always played them on Windows Media Player, so I did not convert them anymore.

But today I was playing my hundredth file or so, and my screen went WHITE. I could not press Escape or [Control, Alt and Delete], or even turn the PC off.

I had to uplug it to turn it off.

This is the first time this "new" PC has crashed (16 months old). When I reopened the folders I got an error box but did not have chance to take a screenshot.

It said something like:

WMP did not close down properly last time, because of a plugin, so we have turned off voluntary plugins.

I clicked OK and it let me carry on working.

But then a few files later, it crashed again!


I do not want to cause any more damage to my PC by making it crash every few .amr files.

What plugins is it referring to?

Is it one that lets WMP play .AMR files?

If so, I did not choose to install that. The PC played those files from Day 1.

If I need to convert the files, does anyone know how to convert them in bulk please? I tried converting files on this PC before, and it took ages because I had to click "OK" to every single one. I literally have thousands of these AMR files, as I get the tunes pop into my head all the time - on average about 40 a day!

Anyone any idea please?

thanks a lot

RealGem said:

Hi,

I am a songwriter and sing little melodies into my phone all the time, so I have thousands of little .amr files, but I am running out of hard drive space, so I need a more efficient way of keeping them on my PC and other hard drives.

I have been very disorganized and have several copies of each file, so the last few days I have been going through them one by one, renaming them and deleting duplicates.

My old XP PC would not play .AMR files; - I had to convert them first. But this PC always played them on Windows Media Player, so I did not convert them anymore.

But today I was playing my hundredth file or so, and my screen went WHITE. I could not press Escape or [Control, Alt and Delete], or even turn the PC off.

I had to uplug it to turn it off.

This is the first time this "new" PC has crashed (16 months old). When I reopened the folders I got an error box but did not have chance to take a screenshot.

It said something like:

WMP did not close down properly last time, because of a plugin, so we have turned off voluntary plugins.

I clicked OK and it let me carry on working.

But then a few files later, it crashed again!


I do not want to cause any more damage to my PC by making it crash every few .amr files.

What plugins is it referring to?

Is it one that lets WMP play .AMR files?

If so, I did not choose to install that. The PC played those files from Day 1.

If I need to convert the files, does anyone know how to convert them in bulk please? I tried converting files on this PC before, and it took ages because I had to click "OK" to every single one. I literally have thousands of these AMR files, as I get the tunes pop into my head all the time - on average about 40 a day!

Anyone any idea please?

thanks a lot

Try running System Restore to a time before this happened: System Restore

"WMP did not close down properly last time, because of a plugin, so we have turned off voluntary plugins."

What other plug-ins have you installed and/or "o.k.ed"?

Have you ran a sfc/scannow?

Thanks

windude99 wrote:
Try running System Restore to a time before this happened

I would but as I have not uploaded or played .amr files for a long time before yesterday, I do not know what corrupt program I am trying to wipe out. Or how far to go back.


indianacarnie wrote:
What other plug-ins have you installed and/or "o.k.ed"?

Sorry, I haven't a clue. The only plugins I know about are for Wordpress websites; not Windows.

indianacarnie wrote:
Have you ran a sfc/scannow?

No - good idea. I will do that now...



Sir George wrote:
To my knowledge, WMP doesn't natively support .AMR files. PotPlayer is a free program which does play them or you can play and convert them using AMR Player, which may be obtained at the following site;

http://www.amrplayer.com/

WMP Mainly supports wma and mp3 but if you follow this link, Download Windows Media Player 9 Codecs Pack 1.0, it will take you to a free add on for Windows media Player. See, Windows media Player needs codec's to play certain things like avi and mov. but this should help you where you can play almost anything.
(I perfer to use PotPlayer or would suggest using AMR Player...personal preference)

HTH


Thanks for your advice, I will download this and let you know how I get on.

Still at the file checker stage at the mo.

Thanks guys. Will report back...

OK, I finshed the sfc /scannow and it says:

"Windows resource protection did not find any integrity violations"

So I will follow Sir George's advice and download the amrplayer...


UPDATE:

OK I have the AMRplayer, and it is going to take days to go through them all. Playing them is not an option, as I have to scroll down to find each file out of hundreds, then add each one into the player, then play it. Bearing in mind that I record several versions of the same tune, so I need to decide on what to keep and what to throw out. I can't concentrate on this if I'm thinking about technical issues.

Even to convert them, it only does one at a time, and it also does not carry the same file name across, so it's asking for a file name for each file! This is making the whole thing about 6 times longer.

Previously, I was double-clicking on a file, playing it, (less than 12 seconds in most cases), then deciding what to do with it in seconds, then onto the next one. That was laborious enough, but I think it would be less work to fire up my XP machine and bulk convert them on there.

Sorry I do appreciate your help though.

I will see if there is a converter that will convert in bulk.

I did a Google search for "How to delete duplicate files in bulk" and found quite a few programs that do it. I don't know anything about them and will leave it up to you to choose one. They are out there. Good luck,

bigmck said:

I did a Google search for "How to delete duplicate files in bulk" and found quite a few programs that do it. I don't know anything about them and will leave it up to you to choose one. They are out there. Good luck,

Thanks a lot, but sadly it won't be suitable, because when I delete the files off my phone, the numbering system goes back to zero.

So I have lots of different files with the same name but in different folders, so I have to be very careful and go through each one to decide what to do with it.

But thanks, I will bear that in mind for future reference. I might use it for my work files.


Regarding the original problem, I have installed K-Lite (I had Shark007 before) and touch wood, WMP has been playing AMR files ok so far.

Please don't close this yet though. I will post back in a few days to confirm that it is ok. If I forget, please close.

thanks