[Flac] Re: FLAC: ERROR, MD5 signature mismatch

[Brian Willoughby]

Unless *both* the samples *and* the md5 checksum were in bad memory.
Of course, --verify would catch this, which just says that anyone who  
ever gets an MD5 error on their system should always use --verify in  
the future.


On Jul 27, 2007, at 10:50, Josh Coalson wrote:
--- Harry Sack <tranzedude at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2007/7/27, Josh Coalson <xflac at yahoo.com>:
>>
>>> But how is it possible then the FLAC encoder allows files which have
>>> a bad
>>> resulting MD5 to be encoded? Is it because of the bad ram, ... this
>>> incorrect MD5 is not detected during encoding?
>>
>> it happens like this, x.wav gets encoded with flac.exe on a machine
>> with bad ram.  flac.exe reads some audio data from x.wav into memory
>> and encodes it.  samples are buffered to md5 checksummer which writes
>> intermediate checksum to bad memory.  md5 is corrupted but samples
>> were encoded ok.  the user will not know unless the --verify option
>> was used during encoding.
>
> Is it also possible the samples themself get corrupted, because they
> are too (just like the md5) written to the memory for encoding them?

yes, but in that case when you decode it you won't get an md5
error.  from flac's point of view everything went fine because
it can't know the samples coming in were wrong to begin with.