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Topic: Errors when compressing WAV merged with GoldWave (Read 4004 times) previous topic - next topic
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Errors when compressing WAV merged with GoldWave

Hello all,

New here, please forgive if this is a noob question but I think I've got a really weird problem.

I'm trying to combine individual tracks ripped from various SACD's into a single WAV file that can be compressed with FLAC. All of the tracks are 24bit/96K. Basically I'm making compilation SACD's off of my SACD collection and then archiving them as FLAC + cue sheet for when the CD-R goes bad and I need to regenerate it.

I'm using GoldWave to merge the tracks. This produces a perfectly good WAV and cue sheet that seem to work fine in a variety of other players.

FLAC will compress each of the individual track WAV's just fine. However, when I try to compress the merged WAV saved from GoldWave FLAC runs fine until about 99% completion when it starts to throw out thousands of errors. All of these errors are of the format "WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk (use --keep-foreign-metedata to keep)". I've let FLAC run for several minutes and it just generates a seemingly endless stream of these errors without completing.

And then it gets even weirder . . .

GoldWave has the ability to save in FLAC so I tried that and GoldWave compressed the merged WAV without generating any errors. HOWEVER, when I decompressed the FLAC file made with GoldWave using FLAC the input and output WAV's did not match. The output was about 0.5% smaller than the input and generated a different checksum. Even stranger, the smaller decompressed WAV will now compress with FLAC without error.

It seems that GoldWave is writing some non-standard data to the merged WAV and that this non-standard data (and hopefully ONLY the non-standard data) is then lost when GoldWave compresses the file to FLAC.

One way or another something goofy is going on here. GoldWave and FLAC don't seem to be playing nice with each other. I could just write out the FLAC from inside GoldWave but that produces a non-identical file on decompression so I'm a little scared of that process. I suspect that the issue is with GoldWave doing something weird when saving the merged WAV but it's impossible to be sure.

Any insight on this one? Anybody have an idea on what's happening?

Sorry if it's not all clear. I'll try to clarify if you folks can't make out what I mean.

Thanks!
XJ.

PS - it's FLAC 1.7.1 and GoldWave 5.66.

Errors when compressing WAV merged with GoldWave

Reply #1
My uneducated guess would be that said “unknown sub-chunk” are some tag that GoldWave is appending to the resulting WAV file. Does it have any options to configure this sort of thing, i.e. to turn it off?

Errors when compressing WAV merged with GoldWave

Reply #2
...And what's the size of the WAV file?

Errors when compressing WAV merged with GoldWave

Reply #3
My uneducated guess would be that said "unknown sub-chunk" are some tag that GoldWave is appending to the resulting WAV file. Does it have any options to configure this sort of thing, i.e. to turn it off?

AFAIK there's no way to control the metadata or header that GoldWave writes to a WAV. While I like it for it's editing capabilities, GoldWave  is, unfortuantely, not very friendly towards file format tweaking.

...And what's the size of the WAV file?

Individual tracks are between 60 and 120Mb.

The merged files are between 1.25 and 2.75Gb.

Errors when compressing WAV merged with GoldWave

Reply #4
An Update:

So I downloaded Audacity and manually merged the tracks with that program. The resulting WAV compressed in FLAC without errors. The FLAC file then decompressed to an exact copy of the original and I was able to master an SACD-R using the decompressed files that played properly in my SACD player.

So whatever the issue is it most definitely seems to be in GoldWave and not FLAC.

Audacity doesn't have an automatic file merge feature so it's not going to work well for me. I'll just have to abandon GoldWave and find another program that will automerge a set of high rate files.


Further Update:

A merged WAV created with GoldWave can be "fixed" by importing it into Audacity and re-exporting it as a new WAV file. The resulting WAV will compress and decompress perfectly with FLAC.

This clearly points to GoldWave writing some sort of extra data into WAV files that FLAC is choking on. At this point I don't think I'll be trusting GoldWave with my files anymore.


Cheers,
XJ.

Errors when compressing WAV merged with GoldWave

Reply #5
Just a quick off-topic question: with what are you mastering your SACD-R disk?
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Errors when compressing WAV merged with GoldWave

Reply #6
I experimented with some 24-bit 96 KHz audio files and Goldwave's merge function, but didn't get any problems. I did have to be careful to select 96000 Hz in the merge dialog, and to select the right "attributes" (WAV 24-bit 96 KHz stereo) in the output file-save dialog. I noticed it had two different options for that, one being "obsolete". Maybe that makes a difference?

Errors when compressing WAV merged with GoldWave

Reply #7
Wavosaur also writes it's own metadata to WAV files, just to warn ya before you try that one too.  Also a disappointment since Wavosaur can read/write some large files really quickly.
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