[Flac] how to get flac fingerprint from a wav?

[Brian Willoughby]

Jeff,

The MD5 signature is computed from the unencoded audio data, so you  
do not need any FLAC code to generate it from a wav file.  But I  
don't think there is any existing utility to compute this value.   
Most MD5 utilities look at the entire file, not just the audio data.   
So you would need some code that can open a wav file, isolate the  
audio samples, and compute the MD5 signature.  I believe that the bit  
depth and number of channels has no bearing on the signature, because  
MD5 just looks at a sequence of bytes.  This means a very simple  
program could handle it without complete wav format parsing.  Just a  
chunk reader looking for 'data' and then printing the MD5 result.

You are correct that it would be much faster not to do the  
compression, especially since the uncompressed audio is all that is  
needed.

Perhaps someone could write a small program that would live in the  
'examples' directory of the flac source code, and use the MD5  
subroutine from libFLAC.  Sorry for the [flac-dev] answer on the  
[flac] list.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting


On Jan 31, 2008, at 18:48, Jeff wrote:

In windows command line:

I have a wav file and would like to see what the flac fingerprint  
would be.

To do this I run flac to encode the wav file and write the flac file  
to the
hard disk. I then run metaflac to read the flac file and display the
fingerprint.

Is there an existing way or other utility to do this without  
generating the
flac file on the hard disk. I would think it could be quicker and  
save time
without writing the flac file to the hard disk.