[Flac] Re: Converting to 1.1.4, help please!

[Brian Willoughby]

"reflac" seems like a decent script for being absolutely certain  
about the conversion, but I can't help but think that it would run 5  
times faster without the "flac -t" and also using a single flac re- 
encode without the intermediate WAV file.  I haven't done this  
before, so I have no idea whether the metadata blocks would be  
preserved more easily without the intermediate file.

Seems like Tim might want to rewrite "reflac" to do less, since  
that's a really old computer.  Cutting out the intermediate WAV would  
certainly reduce the disk access, which should speed things up a  
lot.  And Josh hints that "flac -t" might be less needed now that  
1.1.4 is out.  I think "flac -t" is slow, but if it isn't then it  
wouldn't hurt to have it in there, of course.

Brian W.


On Apr 11, 2007, at 19:18, Jud White wrote:

You're right it decodes to WAV then re-encodes.. it uses flac option  
"-w" (warnings as error) and checks for error return codes.. if an  
error occurs it restores the original file and reports the problem  
when it fnishes or you ^C the program.. After re-encoding it deletes  
the wav, reads the original FLAC's metadata blocks (minus streaminfo  
and seektable) and writes them to the new FLAC file.. then it double  
checks the sample count in both flacs match (just in case), runs  
"flac -t" on the new file to ensure the header and stream are in good  
shape (in case of any probs in writing the metadata blocks), then it  
deletes the backup (if you have that option turned on).

I ran it on 50GB of FLAC (1700 files) on a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz, 2GB of  
RAM and it took a long time.. not sure exactly because I interrupted  
it a lot but maybe around 10 hours.

The -r recursive means process subdirectories.. for example I have g: 
\flac, g:\flac\a, g:\flac\b, etc .. so from g:\flac I just run it  
with -r and it processors all the subdirs.

Tim wrote:
> Hey Jud, Thanks!
> I copied two of my FLAC folders (CDs) into a temp dir just to test  
> it out
> and see if I could get it to run.
> I put the four unzipped files into the dir folder and opened a cmd  
> window
> using the same options you suggested:
> "reflac -r -8 -nw -nb"
>
> It looks as though it first converts the files to WAV then re- 
> encode them
> into FLAC 1.1.4 then deletes the WAV, correct?
>
> I was worried that the tags might vanish, but when I opened the  
> files in
> both MP3Tag and Rio Manager all of the tags were there and correct.
>
> I understand the -8 -nb and -nw, but what exactly is -r "recursive"?
>
> Thanks again!
>
> Now the only question is how many days it will take to re-encode  
> over 1200
> CDs on a circa 2000 P4 (socket 723 I think) with 256MB RAM?
>
> Tim
>
>
>> Hi Tim,
>>
>> I threw something together tonight that might help: http:// 
>> cdtag.com/download/reflac.zip (freeware/open source)
>>
>> The command line syntax is pretty simple.. it'll be something like  
>> this:
>> reflac -r -8 -nw -nb
>>
>> Which is, respectively:
>> recursive, compression level 8, no child windows, no backups
>>
>> Of course, set it to suit your own tastes.. I ran it on my own  
>> collection and it did the trick.
>>
>> -Jud