FLAC 1.1.3 released Options

[jcoalson]

FLAC 1.1.3 has been released. Almost 2 years in the making, FLAC 1.1.3 is a major release with improved compression, improved cover art and multichannel support, better recovery for corrupted files, many new features and options in the command-line tools, and several bug fixes. For developers, the decoder and encoder APIs have also been simplified and there is a new porting guide. See the changelog entry for complete details.

Josh

[SoleBastard]

I wanted to check out the 'better multichannel support' of this new flac release so I did the following:

I extracted some PCM .wav files from a DVD-A disc I own, they're 24 bit 44.1KHz. I used Wavewizard v0.54b to merge the 6 .wav files according to Microsoft's standard order (L, R, C, LFE, RL, RR) into one big 5.1 24bit PCM .wav.

I then fed this file to convert using Foobar 0.9.4.2 set to preserve the bit depth and using the standard commandline: -s -8 - -o %d (even put my windows locale to English (UK)). This conversion failed and gives me the following error: Error writing to file (Encoder has terminated prematurely with code 1; please re-check parameters).

I tried feeding the same merged .wav file to the official flac frontend but it failed too, giving me both a warning (legacy WAVE file has format type 1 but bits-per-sample=24) and an error (WAVE has >2 channels but is not WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE; cannot assign channels.

I've been converting my DVD-A discs using this very same method combined with FLAC 1.1.2 without any problems before. Moreover, putting back the 'old' flac.exe (1.1.2) to the Foobar folder results in a perfect encode.

What's up with the 'better mutlichannel support'?

(Regardless of this, thank you very much for creating this nice lossless encoder!)

This post has been edited by SoleBastard: Dec 5 2006, 06:31

[Egor]

What's up with the 'better mutlichannel support'?

The new flac 1.1.3 requires multichannel wav files to be in WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE, but currently fb2k generates it in WAVE_FORMAT_EX for 'compatibility' reason.

Besides convincing Peter to add _EXTENSIBLE support to Converter, you can try the following undocumented option:

Foobar2000 generates multichannel WAV files, which are not compatible with flac.exe 1.1.3 and Windows Media Encoder. I've sent you a sample to the address at sf.net.

ok, these look like the WAV files flac used to generate too, they are 6ch WAVEFORMATEX which are technically not allowed but common.

the way I am handling this in flac-1.1.3 is an undocumented option '--channel-map=none' to let flac assume the channels are in WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE's order. note that you still have to feed flac a multichannel file that uses one of the legal channel assignments (http://flac.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*...ml#frame_header) if you want to make sure the decoded WAV later has the right channels in the right order with the right channel mask.

This post has been edited by Egor: Dec 5 2006, 06:54