Hi,
I just embarked on a big project to rip all my CDs to FLAC (I already have high quality lossy files, but lossless is lossless )
I decided to go with Plextools Pro as it rips very fast with my Plextor 716A and is supposedly as secure as EAC. Plus, it allows direct ripping to FLAC (with automatic tagging). However, I just tested some of the files I ripped in the first session yesterday and all of them give me this error when testing them through the FLAC frontend:

It always happens right at the beginning of the files. I suspected the tagging of Plextools; But if i manually remove the tags with MP3Tag, the problem persists. Only if I let Plextools extract the files without entering any information or freedb-query, Plextools seemingly does not add a tag, and then the files work. If I then add tags with MP3Tag, everything still works. So something must be screwed up when Plextools adds the FLAC tags. Strangely, although the FLAC frontend gives error warnings when testing or decoding the files, they play without problems in WinAMP.
Has anyone experienced this issue? My guess is that Plextools is buggy and somehow corrupts the FLAC file when the tag is added, maybe it simply overwrites the beginning of the file with the tag? Interestingly, when I force FLAC to decode the file despite the errors, the resulting .wav file also gives errors when I try to encode it back to .flac - FLAC complains that the .wav file is unexpectedly shorter than it thought. Strange...

Something I experienced yesterday which may be a lead...

I downloaded CDex 1.60 from RareWares yesterday--it's an unofficial modified version, a beta, with a few additional features (in relation to the official, stable 1.51), among them ripping directly from CD audio to FLAC.

I tested it. I ripped one track to FLAC--one that I've already got in a FLAC archive (which I'd made by ripping from CDex 1.51 to WAV and then to FLAC with the FLAC frontend). I compared the two files. The FLAC from CDex 1.60 was quite larger than the older one, though I used the same compression setting, -5, for both. I dragged the new FLAC into Winamp and played it. OK. But then I double-clicked to edit the file's metadata, and lo and behold, Winamp froze and I had to nuke it.

So I have a hunch we've both been up against the same buggy FLAC Encoder DLL. Of course, I'm not sure. But it seems bloody like it.

can you upload a sample file for testing?

Josh

Test file uploaded here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=37827

I see the problem... the length of the VORBIS_COMMENT metadata block is wrong, it is one byte greater than it should be. so when the decoder eats the comment block it also eats the first byte of the first frame and loses sync.

it will take some investigation to see if this is a libFLAC problem or plextools in the way it writes tags.

my first hunch is that they may not be handling the tag value encoding right... the tags in the file are ascii, but since it looks like spanish... did you tag it with any non-ascii characters? (like with accents?) then maybe plextools converted them to ascii but did not correct the byte count.

Josh

btw if I fix the VORBIS_COMMENT length in the file, it is perfectly decodable.

It happened with all files, even if no accents or other symbols were used. In the sample I uploaded, there were only ascii characters AFAIK. But regardless of this, Plextools also seems to screw up non-ascii characters in the tags if they actually do occur. Strangely, with some programs (like dbpowerAMPs 'popup info' in the Explorer), the non-ascii characters are displayed correctly, while with other programs (like MP3Tag or the WinAmp flac plugin) they are converted to characters like '?'
I am going to upload another sample that makes use of non-ascii characters so you can check it.

What version of Plextools Pro are you using? This is/was a known problem that is fixed since version 2.19a

Hope that helps.

That thread seems to talk about a different problem; anyway, I'm using Plextools Pro 2.21. I'm still waiting for an answer from Plextor support. I'll post here what they say to this problem.

If that helps I use Plextools Pro 2.23 and never had this problem.

Triza

Please don't expect them to write back - I haven't yet recieved any answer to bug reports and questions.