FLAC Issue

[JohnS]

I’ve been experimenting with Firefly’s FLAC transcoding capabilities and came across something I thought I should mention for the benefit of others who might be doing the same thing…

My music collection is WMA Lossless. I generated some FLAC files by using one of the more popular conversion packages, dbPowerAMP, which performed the WMA Lossless to FLAC conversion without problem. The FLAC files generated would play on such “standard” players as Monkey’s Audio and foobar2000, however they WOULD NOT work with Firefly. I’d be able to see the FLAC files in my library with my M1000, the track information would be properly identified (type: WAV), but when I actually tried to play the track I would get the “Unable to play” message.

After a looking into the matter a little more closely, I discovered the FLAC files that dbPowerAMP generates from WMA Lossless files DO NOT start with the standard “fLaC” marker at the beginning of the file. They instead begin with (for some reason) “ID3″…probably indicating an ID3 tagging scheme. Apparently, when transcoding from WMA Lossless to FLAC and selecting the “Preserve tags” option, dbPowerAMP inserts the “ID3” at the beginning of the file. When the “preserve tags” option is NOT selected dbPowerAMP places the correct “fLaC” marker at the beginning of the file.

Turns out Firefly transcodes the correctly marked files just fine, and coughs on the files beginning with the “ID3” byte-sequence.

To make a long story short: If you are experimenting with FLAC files and Firefly and encounter problems, have a look at the byte sequence at the very beginning of the file, which should be “fLaC” before Firefly will successfully transcode them. Looks like this problem only occurs with FLAC files transcoded using dbPowerAMP and selecting the “Perserve Tags” option.

JohnS

[grommet]

Is it only the ID3 byte sequence, or does it really create ID3v2 tags? If it does generate ID3v2 in FLAC, check your configuration? I’m pretty sure dbPowerAMP uses “OGG” style tags for FLAC by default. If you can’t stop it from writing ID3, it’s time to report it to Spoon (the author). Bug.

ID3 tagging is not recommended for FLAC, though it is valid in a sense. If Firefly does choke on it, I guess it’s a bug, too. But it’s best to avoid it…

[JohnS]

It actually created ID3 tags, and thanks for pointing out that the FLAC tagging format is configurable in dbPowerAMP. Turns out that it was set as ID3 on my system (probably the default setting, since I wasn’t even aware until now that it was configurable). When the tagging format is set to OGG, the WMA to FLAC transcoding works fine and the “fLaC’ marker occurs at the beginning of the file which seems to make Firefly happy now. Thanks for bringing the configurability of this aspect of dbPowerAMP to my attention, grommet.

[Author]

Posts