I completed my CD archiving a few weeks ago... EAC secure into Monkey Audio. But now I am realising a requirement for linux support. Note, I'm no zealot.

Basically, I need to convert for now. I have been fiddling with this for a few days... command line utils, front ends and dbpoweramp. I've established an inability to produce MD5 perfect copies of the original wave files... is this to be expected going through both APE and FLAC? I feel like the paranoia is setting in, but isn't the aim always perfect reproduction? I have read about padding and tags, but shouldn't the effects disappear on decode?

Do the Gurus out there trust certain utilities for these actions?

Funny to be losing sleep over things like this, when there is probably no way I could ever tell a hypothetical difference... but I guess I am here because I like to know (and hear) the truth.

Help!

If there's a difference the decoder/encoder is bork or you added tags that are not part of the format specs.
Otherwise there will not be any difference.

There are useful and free bit-to-bit comparators, if you want to feel safe. EAC had one (but you need to decode your lossless files first), and latest beta of foobar2000 0.7 include the same tool. And you don't need to decode files with this last one.

Note that I encode a flac file -> ape format this evening with fb2k: no problem.

I had been using fsum.exe on the command line to do my checking... but I think I'll try EAC now.

Also, I had been adding tags (through EAC initially, also used Tag frontend for some). The albums are as one file, with a CUE (problem with tags?). I am hoping that the initial EAC rips are okay.

Time to do some testing...

Okay, done some checks based on suggestions... It seems the 'Preserve ID Tags' option has been messing things up when moving to FLAC and back. Foolish of me? But without this I am obviously losing information that is outside of the CUE.

EAC says that the WAV files are error free even when the MD5 checksums change.

Need sleep, so that will have to do for today.

Thanks!

Which version of dBpowerAMP Music Converter have you tried?

I originally had a problem getting dMC (prior to release 10) to use the exact encoder I wanted it to. spoon recommended I use dMC r10beta7, and that fixed the problem for me.

I don't know if your problem may be related to getting dMC to point to the correct encoder (if you're not already using the newest version), but if it's possible, you could try downloading dMC r10beta7, and if that doesn't do it, try also posting a support request directly in the dMC Support Forum.

And if this has nothing to do with your problem, then I apologize for the distraction...

The MD5 of the whole original WAVE and the WAVE->FLAC/APE->WAVE may not be identical even though the audio is identical. There may be other non-audio subchunks that are not kept in the encoding process.

Josh

Yes, dBpowerAMP will write a WAVEFORMATEX header where EAC writes a WAVEFORMAT header, 2 bytes different.