Flac - Jun 2010 - ho do I encode multi channel flacs

Hi, maybe this has already been discussed already.. I _did_ search the
archives, found no solution...

I have a 4.1 channel track, I rip it to 5 separate mono wav files.

Is it possible to encode these independant files to one single multi-channel
flac file with flac?

I heard a bit about ripping to wav, converting all mono tracks to flac
separately (i had to use --channel-map=none to get this to work), then
muxing the 4.1 channels into an ogg container, but didn't even manage to
find info on how to do this.

Would really appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction.


Errr, or then again, perhaps this is a totally irrelevant question for most
people who do not have Uber receivers?

If I have a DVD-Audio disc with 4.1 channel MLP, and I want to store it in
my digital music library, then I will either be playing back the
multi-channel flac via the PC soundcard to a 4.1 speaker system (im not and
wouldn't want to), or will play back using PC connected to an AV receiver,
but this will _only_ work if the AV receiver supports FLAC natively, and
those receivers are way above my price class.  Even then you could maybe not
do passthrough using TOSLink (bandwidth not enough) but would need at least
HDMI to transfer the mult.ch. flac?  And then the question is if HDMI does
passthrough?

In my situation, then, it's best just storing the DVD-A disc as an iso on
the computer and rip to 24/96 stereo flac to store in digital mucic
collection.  Can then output using USB DAC (stereo) to AV receiver.

But assuming you had the gear... Is it posible to encode multi ch. flac?

--Andrew
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Andrew Henry wrote:
> I have a 4.1 channel track, I rip it to 5 separate mono wav files.
>
> Is it possible to encode these independant files to one single
multi-channel
> flac file with flac?
I don't know how to do this with flac(1).  My best guess is to somehow 
make a multichannel WAV or AIFF file then encode it with flac to make 
the multichannel FLAC file.  I have not tried this.

I can help you do this task with Audacity 
(http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), a GUI sound editor.

Load the tracks into audacity, and (on GNU/Linux) pick Edit -> 
Preferences... and make sure that the Import/Export preferences are set 
to "Use custom mix (for example to export a 5.1 multichannel file).  You 
can drag the tracks up and down or pick "Move track up"/"Move
track
down" in the track pop-up menu to reorder the tracks.

To make the FLAC file pick File -> Export... and FLAC as your output 
format.  You'll be able to assign tracks to channels as you wish just 
before Audacity makes the multichannel FLAC file.

Nautilus properly identifies my test FLAC file as a 5-track FLAC file. 
Audacity also loads it and shows me the tracks.

Good luck.