[Flac-dev] wav to flac corruption

[Matthew Davis]

Thank you for the reply!  I know that my system can play flac files, I've
played others I've managed to convert using both of those programs.  I'm
only running into difficulty when it comes to these large WAV files.  By
"Does not work" I mean that they do not play, and instead I receive the
errors I mentioned in my original post.  I wasn't actually intending to use
wavsplit to split the flac files, it was just something I had during some
testing for how to split these files.  I'm actually going to be splitting
during the conversion since the flac tool supports specifying time marks.

Is there something that could be wrong with the WAV files that prevent them
from being able to convert to FLAC?  Is there someway I can test the
integrity of the WAV files?

Thanks again in advance,
Matthew

On Feb 5, 2008 6:07 PM, Brian Willoughby <brianw at sounds.wa.com> wrote:

> Matthew,
>
> I don't think I can answer your entire question, but I will list a
> few pieces of information.
>
> 1) I regularly convert very large AIFF files, up to 4 GB, using
> flac.  I sometimes work with WAV, and that seems to work, too.  On my
> Mac, I can play flac files just fine in Play.app, VLC, and my own
> software.
>
> 2) What do you mean the flac "files do not work"?  You mean they
> don't play?  They will only play from software with full support for
> the flac format, which means many popular applications will not work.
>
> 3) I have not heard of "flac123" - perhaps this program is out of
> date or is missing support.  Maybe the author(s) of flac123 will
> comment.
>
> 4) Those warning mean that your Broadcast Wave File (BWF) is being
> converted to standard audio flac, without any of the metadata from
> the BWF.  You'll need to use --keep-foreign-metadata if there is any
> importance to having the original BWF restored later.  However, if
> all you need is the audio and none of the other information, then you
> can safely ignore these warnings.  FLAC always preserves all of the
> audio losslessly, you only ever have to worry about losing non-audio
> data.
>
> 5) You can only split a flac file if your splitting program
> understands the format.  You should learn the FLAC library and see
> what kind of support it has for breaking a stream.  If you use other
> tools to split the file without knowledge of the FLAC format, you
> will lose data.  In other words, you must develop a new program,
> maybe called "flacsplit," to do this, because wavsplit will not work
> on FLAC (unless they parse the FLAC format correctly as well as WAV).
>
> I hope some of this information helps.
>
> Brian Willoughby
> Sound Consulting
>
>
> On Feb 5, 2008, at 16:54, Matthew Davis wrote:
> I'm attempting to convert fairly large WAV files (90 - 800 MB each)
> using flac but the files do not work after the encoding. (The play
> fine in wav format)
>
> Command I'm using:
>
> flac --verify -8 file.wav
>
> Attempting to run the file with either flac123 or the default player
> for Ubuntu (Movie Player?) results in the extremely terse messages:
> Default Player: "An Error Occurred: Could Not Decode Stream"
> flac123: "error handler called!" <- repeated over and over and over
>
> There are no errors during the encoding, though there are some
> warnings.  Here is the output:
>
> asdarq at eighty-desktop:~$ flac -f -8 --verify 10_A.wav
>
> 10_A.wav: WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk 'bext' (use --keep-
> foreign-metadata to keep)
> 10_A.wav: WARNING: legacy WAVE file has format type 1 but bits-per-
> sample=24
> 10_A.wav: WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk 'minf' (use --keep-
> foreign-metadata to keep)
> 10_A.wav: WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk 'elm1' (use --keep-
> foreign-metadata to keep)
> 10_A.wav: 100% complete, ratio=0.62410_A.wav: WARNING: skipping
> unknown sub-chunk 'regn' (use --keep-foreign-metadata to keep)
> 10_A.wav: WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk 'ovwf' (use --keep-
> foreign-metadata to keep)
> 10_A.wav: WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk 'umid' (use --keep-
> foreign-metadata to keep)
> 10_A.wav: Verify OK, wrote 168060055 bytes, ratio=0.624
>
>
> As a final random test, I attempted to split one of the wav files (my
> ultimate goal is split flac files) using wavsplit.  That resulted in
> the following output/error.
>
> Channels: 1
> Samplerate: 96000Hz
> Samplebits: 24
> Databytes: 269503836
>
> Split         Hours  Mins   Seconds         Bytes         %
> Bad file format
>
>
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