Recently I Have been converting my collection of cd's to flac and I have been playing them back through winamp via the flac plugin.

First Error

This is the strange part I had one file that was ripped off a cd with EAC and I am pretty sure that it was fine and had no errors than I did the usual process of converting them with speek's frontend for flac.

In speek's frontend I checked decode through errors checkbox.

Then oneday I was playing that song and I noticed a artifact around the middle of the song that was about half a second long and was in the high frequency range.

I can't really describe it as it is too hard to explain.

Second Error

I was encoding a song and flac reported A block chunk error? I dunno
But it resulted in some screwed up song.I just encoded it again and it was fine.

Third Error

This is the one I am worried about

Okay this has happened to me about 4 times in winamp!
And no i am not gonna switch to foobar2000

I loaded about 150 flac songs into winamp and I like to check them out and play some songs for a minute and some for 10 seconds and some songs even 1-2 seconds long.

Here is what is happening i'll be checking some of my songs out in winamp and only listening to them for about 2 seconds and when I switch to around the 8th to 10th song I here the same artifact in the first error but more shaper and it happens 4 times with no audio, not even the song just the artifact.

And then my computer reboots.

This is really annoying and i would like to find out what is causing this, Maybe me switching from song to song is causing to much cpu usage and the decoder is crashing ???

EDIT: Typo

I suspect it's bad hardware that causes these errors. Have you overclocked your system? You could run memtest to see if there's bad RAM in your computer.

Bad hardware, I sure it wouldn't be that would it?

My computer is not overclocked and is fast and fine.

It doesn't produce that artifact on any other codec in winamp like ogg and mp3 and aac etc...

If it was bad hardware, I would think my computer would slow down and play stuttery audio.Even my cpu usage doesn't look like it's stressed out when it happens.

When it happens it only takes like 3 seconds and my computer reboots.

I don't get any bsod's and when i play the audio it's just like 4 sharp stuttery hisses.

The usual cause for FLAC errors is bad hardware... Flac is pretty sensitive for these kind of problems. I truly recommend you try memtest, http://www.memtest.org/ and run an extensive test on your memory. 10 to 1 there's a memory problem on your computer....

This is indeed true. My main PC is a rock solid laptop. Once I bought a USB PCMCIA card and used it with my laptop. Nothing seemed to be wrong, but I started to get FLAC errors. Needless to say I did not know the source of the problem at that time, but walking through all the changes I made since I last used FLAC I tracked it down to this card. And sure enough the FLAC errors went away once the card were removed.

I say FLAC encoding and decoding is a very good stability test.

Triza

I am just gonna have to put a with the problem as i do not know what is causing it and memtest86+ didn't report any errors.

AFAIK how does hardware affect the occasional playback of flac files to horrible sounds and a reboot.

I've had exactly the same problem (as in the 1st post) the other day, after been using Flac for a long time this was the first time I had errors like that.
I kan live with an occational error while decoding, but not encoding. Is the "-v" parameter a guarantee that the encoding is OK ???

-V, yes.

there is some evidence that a specific motherboard/chipset (a via+athlon one I think) is buggy and causes these flac problems (among others), search the flac sourceforge bugs for more info.

Josh