Partially completing (music album) torrents

You know how when someone changes album art or tags on an album after uploading/downloading it, and is the only 'seeder' left on the torrent, you will end up with a 95-99.9% complete torrent? This is because the metadata has been changed and doesn't perfectly match the original torrent.

I'm wondering if when a piece perpetual fails its hash check in this way, could you be missing any data of the tracks themselves, or will you only lose the original meta-data. If so, I'm pretty sure you will not get the altered meta-data instead (right?). I've always wondered if I should delete these torrents because the songs are gonna be missing data, or if it's no biggie and I'm only missing some tags. I don't really know that much about the inner workings of torrents and hopefully someone else here does and can clarify this.

I was reading about this few days ago on what.cd. What I could gather from there was that you will get the old metadata, the tags which existed before uploading the torrent. If after uploading, the metadata changes and you are downloading it, then utorrent takes it as bad data and bans the IP of the seeder who is sending the modified data. So in this way, the data which you receive after the tags are changes is considered as data wasted on the torrent. So you get the old tagged data or you don't get the data at all.

I know I sound confusing, but I don't know how to explain it.

Coming to your main question, its totally up to you whether you want to keep the old metadata music and tag it yourself or you want to delete it. Personally I think you should tag it yourself if you don't have lots of torrents which ended up this way.

So is it possible to lose parts of the songs, or is it strictly the metadata that I will lose (assuming the hash fail is because of changed tags). I'm not sure how 'pieces' work. Would a torrent have metadata and the actual music file data in the same piece? If so, wouldn't the piece fail resulting in a loss of metadata and a loss somewhere in the actual file? That would be my concern with these incomplete torrents (I always run my albums through mpgtag since oftentimes their tags are incomplete).

depends on torrent piece sizes
also mp3 header will be lost, and most likely you are not able to run it properly

can't you check that in 'files' tab of utorrent? :unsure:

I havent understood well what you asked.but in my knowledge i know with albums the culprit for 99.9 % complete downloads is usually the m3u playlist file.WMP has a habit of corrupting it.changing the attribute to r/o for m3u files will fix that..i dont think the mp3s get affected in any way.

depending on the size of the album, which will decide piece size, yes data will be lost. If a piece fails the hash check, then the whole piece gets cancelled.

This is only if the tags are changed.

like squirr3l says, check the files tab. If the tags have been changed, then several or all the files will have pieces cancelled.