[Flac] CDex and Flac

[rsdio at sounds.wa.com]

Where did your rip files come from?  Are they WAVE or AIFF?  My hunch is that  
technically bad files were created when you ripped your CDs.  "data pad byte"  
sounds like one of those things that is required in WAVE/AIFF, but many  
application developers miss.  As a result of the various errors out there, many  
tools will accept bad audio files without complaint, others will point out the  
error.  I cannot be sure if this is what is happening, but that "unexpected  
EOF" makes me think that a chunk ended on an odd byte, and that's not legal  
because all chunks must be an even number of bytes long.

Oh, wait, I just noticed that the message says 536 million samples were  
expected and only 12 million were found.  This looks suspiciously like the  
kinds of bad files I was seeing with cdrecord, or another of the open source CD  
tools.  I never did have the time to track down that bug and fix it.  Too bad,  
because those tools seemed to rip audio faster than iTunes, but produced bad  
audio files.  I do have some tools for repairing bad AIFF, but they not  
available for distribution.

Since you may not be a developer, my advice would be to rip your CDs with  
another tool, and then test the same FLAC frontend to see if it is the ripped  
files that are causing the problem.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting


Begin forwarded message:

Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:20:45 +1200
From: Aaron Whitehouse <lists at whitehouse.org.nz>
To: flac at xiph.org
Subject: [Flac] CDex and Flac
List-Archive: <http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac>

I am using CDex to encode my music into Flac. I am using the latest
version of Flac (with the frontend etc.) and sending the rips to it as
an 'external encoder' with the string:
-8 -o %2 -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%b" -T "date=%y" -T
"tracknumber=%tn" -T "genre=%g" -

However, I am getting the below output/error with every file.
I assume that it is because I am sending Flac the incorrect file size or
track length but I do not know what to change in the string to correct
it. The flac files produced seem to work fine, but I would like to get
rid of the error if I can.

--------- -------- --------
options: -P 4096 -b 4608 -m -l 12 -e -q 0 -r 0,6
-:2% complete, ratio=0.667-: WARNING: unexpected EOF; expected 536870902
samples, got 12828672 samples
-: ERROR during read of data pad byte

-: 2% complete, ratio=0.664
--------- -------- --------

In addition, and because I am writing anyway, I cannot seem to get it to
create ogg-flacs. I have tried adding '--ogg' to the beginning of the
string above and changing the extension, but that seems to yield files
which are unplayable in any of the players (Winamp with plugin, WMP with
directshow filters, downloading VLC to test it with that) but which are
(quickly) marked as 'okay' by the FLAC frontend - far faster than a test
of a Native file. I am wondering if it is simply that the above error is
causing more problems for ogg-flac than flac-native. Is there a simple
utility which can convert FLAC-native to ogg-FLAC without re-encoding
and translating tags?

Thanks a lot in advance. Top work - all of your products are highly
recommended by me to all.

Aaron