File date order [LWN.net]

File date order

Posted Jan 10, 2007 1:11 UTC (Wed) by piman (subscriber, #8957)
In reply to: File date order by Lockjaw
Parent article: Review: Exaile Media Player (Linux.com)

This is all way simpler than you're making it. :) The FLAC files just have ID3 data prepended to them. That makes them corrupted files, but many FLAC decoders can still read them, because many broken encoders write them, because many FLAC decoders read them, etc.

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File date order

Posted Jan 10, 2007 17:59 UTC (Wed) by Lockjaw (guest, #4611) [Link]

Yep - the "broken" flacs worked on my Sonos system (and maybe one of xmms and xine, although I don't remember exactly), but I couldn't convert them to ogg vorbis with oggenc.

Still, you must admit some there's strange voodoo going on with grip creating them broken, and everything working just fine when I cut and paste the "flac" command I catch from grip using "ps" during the encoding. If it's really ID3 prepended that's the problem, then grip must be using a different library for the encoding even though it's executing the same flac command. Hmmm...

In any case, I can't have broken files, so they have to be fixed somehow. I'm rather addicted to the grip workflow after doing 600 discs with it, so next time I need to do a bunch I'll have to at least automate the repair with a script (or go back to the version of grip that worked when I did the 600...).

BTW - while I'm on the subject of being over-the-top with getting correct rips, let me put in a plug for using secure-cdparanoia.py. It's a python script that runs cdparanoia repeatedly on each disc, checking to make sure they read the same each time (or at least letting you know if they don't); I was surprised by how many don't. Also, plextor drives are worth the extra money. There's no better way to be convinced of this than ripping 600 discs a second time because of too many audible pops in the first set.

File date order

Posted Jan 11, 2007 4:32 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

In the Grip Config/ID3 panel there is a checkbox "Only tag files ending in .mp3". Turn this on and the problem should go away. It encodes to FLAC using the command line and then does the tagging itself.

File date order

Posted Jan 11, 2007 17:18 UTC (Thu) by Lockjaw (guest, #4611) [Link]

Thanks - makes perfect sense. The grip upgrade caused problems with my .grip config, and it must have gotten switched somewhere along the line. I'm sure I went too fast reconstructing it and thought "of course I want the tags", not thinking of the difference between tags and comments.