When compressing via plain non-stdin command line interface the FLAC files come out a little smaller than by using Foobar for trancoding. Foobar has added some additional data at the beginning of the file. What is the purpose of this data? I haven't noticed that seeking would be slower without it.


Frontah:
Screenshot

Foobar v0.8.3 + FLAC v1.1.2/v1.1.3:
Screenshot

That's strange...

Just a guess, but... shouldn't there be 8 KB padded datas at the beginning of any flac (1.1.3) file? From what I see on the first screenshot, they're clearly missing. Did you add a commandline to disable or lower the padding size?

He said there was 20kb of junk though, and if the default is 8kb, that wouldn't account for all that data.

This is a known issue (lots of seekpoints with fb2k) and unfortunately Peter isn't going to fix it

Topic at hydrogenaudio.org
Bug at sourceforge.net

I have set the padding to 1 kB. Thank you for the explanation, Egor.

You should try to convert it using a tempfile (I don't have foobar here right now, so I can't write more specific, but it can be specified in the converter profiles in foobar) - it should reduce the number of seekpoints to a normal level (works well for me).
You won't see that beatiful progress bar and speed indicator, though

(but I haven't tried to convert w/o tempfile since 0.9.1, it may be fixed since then )

i could be wrong, but i believe he already explained why foobar2000 does that. see here

Thanks for the link, but I would agree with ghido's RAW support proposal in the thread you mentioned.

Currently the 'invalid length' feature makes it impossible to encode large audio streams with flac.exe neither with stdin nor with temporary WAV file (as foobar2000 produces broken >2GB WAV files).