Flac - Dec 2009 - Switching Left Right Channel

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.

On Dec 17, 2009, at 20:42, Ron Decline wrote:
> 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.

flac -a will analyze, not encode.  Apart from that, you're right.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting

On Dec 18, 2009, at 12:12 AM, Brian Willoughby wrote:
> 
> On Dec 17, 2009, at 20:42, Ron Decline wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> 
> flac -a will analyze, not encode.  Apart from that, you're right.
> 
> Brian Willoughby
> Sound Consulting
> 
Yes, I was thinking 'a'rchive, but just 'flac' to encode