Flac - May 2007 - Flac Files Messed Up By Amarok

A while back I posted about issues with flac files that were not able to 
be decoded.  Here's what I do know:

I've ripped most of my collection to my hard drive using KAudioCreator 
and I've specified that they be stored in flac format.  All files play 
without trouble through Amarok.  I found out there was a problem when I 
had selected files in a playlist and picked "burn" through K3B.  All 
the functions worked appropriately, but then I had problems with 
burning.  I found that if I just ran "flac -d {filename}" on the 
problem files, I always got the same result.  It looked like the file 
was completely decoded and saved as a wav file, but then I got this:

flac -d MyFile.flac test

flac 1.1.2, Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005  Josh Coalson
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software, and you 
are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.  Type `flac' 
for details.

MyFile.flac: done

test: ERROR initializing decoder
      state = FLAC__FILE_DECODER_ERROR_OPENING_FILE

Again, this was *at the end* of decoding, not a the start.

It took me a while, but I found out the files this happened to were 
files where I had edited them in Amarok.

I've been rather tied up, but I finally had time to verify two of the 
files that were not working.  I've uploaded them to my website, but I 
won't be leaving them there long (only a few days), so if a flac 
programmer or two can tell me when they're downloaded so I can remove 
them, I'd appreciate it.  Here are the links:

http://halblog.com/amj.flac
http://halblog.com/CCC.flac

As you can see from above, I'm using flac 1.1.2.  This is on Ubuntu 
Feisty Fawn, which, I'm sure everyone knows, is the latest release.  
This problem may be fixed in later versions, but I would hope a 
backport and security update is possible, since Ubuntu and, I'm sure, 
other distros (like Debian), are still using older versions.

I hope this helps with whatever is going on.  From my perception, it 
seems the problem is that Amarok is somehow rewriting the files either 
incorrectly or not going by a specific standard.  It seems like this is 
one of those bugs where someone else may be making the error, but it 
still needs to be allowed for -- but that's just a layman's point of 
view and a guess.

Hal

--- Hal Vaughan <hal@thresholddigital.com> wrote:
> flac -d MyFile.flac test
> 
> flac 1.1.2, Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005  Josh Coalson
> flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software, and
> you 
> are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.  Type `flac'
> for details.
> 
> MyFile.flac: done
> 
> test: ERROR initializing decoder
>       state = FLAC__FILE_DECODER_ERROR_OPENING_FILE
> 
> Again, this was *at the end* of decoding, not a the start.
I think part of the problem is just the command syntax.

 flac -d MyFile.flac test

means "decode MyFile.flac to MyFile.wav, then decode test to test.wav"

so it decodes MyFile.flac, then when it goes to decode "test"
there is no such file.

the error message is a little more helpful in later versions of
flac.

I downloaded the 2 files (amj.flac and CCC.flac) and if I test
them with flac-1.1.4 I get:

$ flac -t *.flac

flac 1.1.4, Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007  Josh
Coalson
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software, and you
are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.  Type `flac' for
details.

CCC.flac: ok
amj.flac: testing, 97% complete

amj.flac: ERROR while decoding data
          state = FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_END_OF_STREAM

I looked at amj.flac and the audio has been truncated somehow.
the truncation is in the very last frame.  not much flac can
really do except recover audio up to that point.

Josh



 
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