[Flac] Switching Left Right Channel

[Brian Willoughby]

On Dec 17, 2009, at 19:00, Ron Decline wrote:
> On Dec 17, 2009, at 8:50 PM, dathead2 at gmail.com wrote:
>> On Dec 17, 2009, at 8:42 PM, Ron Decline <rutlecorps at gmail.com>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Is it possible to switch the Left / Right channel when encoding  
>>> in FLAC?
>>> (I have some flac files with incorrect left/right channel  
>>> assignment that I would like to re-encode with flac)
>>> _____________________________
>>
>> I'm not sure flac can do that but sox and audacity both easily can
>
> SoX looks promising (and looks like a program that I may have other  
> uses for)
> Looks like "swap" is the command I need, but if I enter "sox  
> file1.flac file2.flac swap" I
> get an error: sox FAIL formats: no handler for detected file type  
> `flac'
> (I'm on OS X and I have libFLAC installed)

I'm not sure whether SoX supports FLAC, but it does support swapping  
channels in other sound file formats.  Make sure you have the latest  
source code for SoX, in case someone has added support for FLAC.  I  
seem to recall reading that it has been expanded to support FLAC, but  
many download sites may still have an old version of SoX without FLAC  
support.

If even the latest SoX has no support for FLAC, then just convert  
your FLAC to WAV, use SoX to swap channels, then convert back to  
FLAC.  I realize that this is a lot of trouble, but you're editing  
the files, and FLAC is not designed for editing.

If you're on a Mac, then afconvert might be able to swap files.   
You'd need a pluging to support FLAC, though, and that's probably  
fairly tricky to install, so you're back to converting to WAV just to  
swap channels.

Good luck!

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting