I like FLAC for its lossless quality, especially since it allows me to easily covert to other formats (like dropping my FLAC files into OggDropXPd for Ogg files at quality seetings I deem suitable for portable players).

However, lately I've encountered FLAC files that OggDropXPd won't even try to encode. These files will either play fine in WinAmp, or in_flac.dll will report a synch error. I can only guess its a problem with the FLAC file itself and not the decoder engines either the WinAmp plugin or OggDropXPd are using, since this happens with about 5% of the FLAC files I use.

My problem is that I can't seem to find any tools out there that'll fix this problem. All I can find are testers that'll tell me what's wrong with the file, not how to fix it to make it playable/decodable. I asked Google (with various different wordings for "fix broken FLAC files", searched the forms, even checked the HydrogenAudio Wiki.

Is there any tools out there that'll help me out? Have I just been using the wrong search strings? Or are these FLAC files borked beyond repair?

If you can play the files, I suppose you can decompress them back to .wav files. You can then compress them to .flac again.

You'll lose tags, but there are tools to copy tags from one file to another.

what's wrong with the files?

if it's any consolation, better repair/recovery is one of the things I'm working on for the next version of flac.

Josh

That does work for the files that will play, but leaves me woefully without recourse on the ones that don't.


I'm not told anything past that it's some sore of sync error.

Oh well. If you're already working on a solution, I can exert some patience and wait for the new release of FLAC.

OK. in the meantime, if you can upload a sample problem file I can take a look. usually stuff like this is caused by apps putting ID3 tags on files. the decoder has logic to try and skip these but it does not always work. also there is another thread here about FLAC files made with some versions of plextools being corrupt.

Josh

Unfortuantely, I deleted them. I'll upload one if I encouter another, though.

Thats great to hear!

You can try my Mediacoder . It uses Winamp plugins as audio decoder, and can transcode to any lossy or lossless audio formats.