[Flac] Switching Left Right Channel

Ron Decline rutlecorps at gmail.com
Thu Dec 17 20:42:42 PST 2009


On Dec 17, 2009, at 11:02 PM, Brian Willoughby wrote:

> 
> 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

Seems that Sox will support flac only if compiled on a machine with flac.  I have libFLAC, but I couldn't get SoX to compile.  I think the errors are due to OS X Snow Leopard switching to x64.

Anyway, as you and dathead2 suggested, I can just flac -d, then swap the channels on the wav with SoX, and then flac -a,  I can then use metaflac to transfer the tags.  Easy enough to write a script to do the work.



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