[Flac-dev] newbie questions re flac on win32 eac and id3v2

[Josh Coalson]

sorry for replying so late...

--- E S <es0123 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Can anyone relate any general tips for using flac on Windows for the
> purpose 
> of archiving cd's? If I can nail down a solid, easy-to-use process,
> I'm 
> happy to write it up and contribute it to the FLAC documentation
> section for 
> the untold masses that I am sure will be soon discovering FLAC ;)
>
> ...

No one has posted such a method yet.  I use EAC for rips
sometimes but I encode separately.  I haven't tried setting
FLAC up as an external comrpressor in EAC.

> Currently, I'm using Exact Audio Copy (EAC) v0.9prebeta11 with FLAC
> 1.0 
> specified under File:Compression Options:External Compression:User
> Defined 
> Encoder. I'm passing %s as a command line option to FLAC (eac
> variable for 
> the wav filename).

that should be OK

> Checking or unchecking "Using CRC check" doesn't seem to do anything
> as far 
> as I can tell.

this probably a left-over from MP3 encoder usage.  leave it
off to be safe so it doesn't pollute the command line.  flac'c
crc checking is always on.

> However, checking "Add ID3 tags" breaks FLAC. EAC is using the
> default 
> options of "Additionally write ID3V2 tags, using a padding of 4kB".
> After 
> ripping and encoding, metaflac reports:
>     ERROR: not a FLAC file (no 'fLaC' header)
> I don't know how to troubleshoot this further, so any suggestions
> would be 
> great.

ID3V2 tags go at the front of the file and should work with
flac.  you have found a bug with metaflac; it is not skipping
the id3v2 tag.  I'll add that to my todo list.

> On the files that do get created correctly (either using flac as an
> external 
> encoder for eac or using flac alone on the command line with a wave
> file) if 
> I run metaflac on the generated flac file, I get the following error:
>     ERROR: short count reading metadata block data

hmm... I will look into that one.  if 'flac -t' says 'ok'
to your flac file, the file is fine and the bug is in
metaflac.

metaflac is meant to be very lightweight.  it reads the
metadata directly from the file instead of passing the
stream through a decoder.  it doesn't even need to be
linked against libFLAC.  that is why you can see a
discrepency where the file decodes fine but metaflac
reports an error. the bug is probably in metaflac.

Josh


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