I've recently been looking into backing up my DVD-A discs so i extracted the mlp tracks with DVDAExplorer and now have single 6ch 24/48 wav files after going through surcodeMLP and wavewizard.
I tried converting the WAVs into FLAC using winamp 5.52 (Flake 0.11). The resulting FLAC files however are only 16-bit (although it's proper 6ch surround and 48khz).
So then i tried using the FLAC reference encoder and the frontend from the official sourceforge site. That didn't work either and gave the following error:

track06.wav: WARNING: legacy WAVE file has format type 1 but bits-per—sample=24
track06.wav: ERROR: WAVE has >2 channels but is not WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE; cannot assign channels

Can anyone please help?

flake supports only 16bps as far as I know.

whatever made the wavs is creating invalid ones. wave specs say any >2 channel file has to be WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE. WAVEFORMATEX cannot store the channel assignment so flac doesn't know which is which.

if you understand the difference, you can override this and store the channels unordered by adding --channel-map=none to the flac args. but you have to decode with the same arg, and channels may be out of order during playback.

better is to fix the wavs with some other tool.

thanks for the speedy reply!
but how is flake able to map the channels properly? Just luck?
Also i know this is the wrong place to ask but if you can recommend a small and quick wav tool that is able to fix this, that would be great!

--channel-map=none worked like a charm
since the channels were correctly mapped (Fl-Fr-C-LFE-Rl-Rr) in the standard header wav.

Thank You!

EDIT: Although the channels are in perfect order during playback on winamp at least, just out of curiosity, are they properly mapped in the FLAC file (since u did say the channels will be stored unordered)? Just wondering if playing them on some other device might not play the channels in order.

Noticed a problem with the FLAC files i just created

On the FLAC frontend when i click test it says OK
However when i try FLAC Tester it gives the following error message for all files:
FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_UNPARSEABLE_STREAM

I don't get it. The files play fine in winamp with all the channels in order and when i view file info in winamp all the info is correct as well (24bit/48khz/6ch)

Can any good Samaritan please help out? i've spent all day trying to do this


EDIT: Is it possible that FLAC Tester isn't compatible with files encoded with the latest version of FLAC (1.2.1b) ?

it probably does the same thing as --channel-map=none

if they're in that order then --channel-map=none does the right thing since they match flac order: http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html#frame_header

yep, it probably is using flac or libFLAC before 1.2.1

>wave specs say any >2 channel file has to be WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE

Microsoft recommends that WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE is used, but there is nothing to say a WAVEFORMATEX with 6 channel is invalid (if the channels stick to the Windows standard), infact there were 6 channel wave files before WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE was even invented.

I have a related issue:

In the real world to get high-def content (ie: from 16-bit/48-KHz onwards) encoded in FLAC is proving to be quite difficult.

No matter how MS may wish WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE be mandatory for > 2/16/48 the real world is not playing catch up since there are practically NO apps using WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE. I mean the format makes sense but what a format is worth if nobody is using it ?

I have many GBs of HD WAVs (and I'm not even saying multi-channel) that I wish to migrate to FLAC as I already done with the 16/41 material many years ago and I'm still getting my head on the wall since there's seems to be no tool/utility to convert/fix from WAVEFORMATEX to WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE which is what the FLAC encoder requires to begin with. I even tried a command line utility called copysfx.exe to no avail either since confuses my 24/96 files as 16/96 ones.

So, how can WAVEFORMATEX files can be migrated/fixed/processed/whatever into the FLAC 1.2.1 encoder ???

"--channel-map=none" will take care of multi-channels in WAVEFORMATEX, if they are stored in the correct order (Fl-Fr-C-LFE-Rl-Rr).
As for high-def content (16-bit/48khz onwards) in WAVEFORMATEX, FLAC encoder only warns you and does not stop the encoding process. You can choose to encode anyways despite warnings.

great ! thanks for your reply !