Hi Ralf,

I tried decoding your flac audio files, but I get this message:

$ flac -d vf18-40.flac

flac 1.1.2, Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005  Josh Coalson
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.  Type `flac' for details.

vf18-40.flac: *** Got error code 2:FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ERROR_STATUS_FRAME_CRC_MISMATCH


vf18-40.flac: ERROR while decoding data
              state = FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_READ_FRAME

Are you able to decode them or am I doing something wrong?

thanks,

Ken 

--- (Edited on 8/20/2007 9:46 pm [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---

I also get the same error with the newest version of flac:

./flac -d vf18-40.flac

flac 1.2.0, Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007  Josh Coalson
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.  Type `flac' for details.

vf18-40.flac: *** Got error code 2:FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ERROR_STATUS_FRAME_CRC_MISMATCH


vf18-40.flac: ERROR while decoding data
              state = FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_READ_FRAME

--- (Edited on 8/20/2007 9:50 pm [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---

Hello Ken,

I am able to decode them from FLAC to WAV.  I am using FLAC for Windows that you can download from the following source:   http://tinyurl.com/33upwp or you can download it from this hyperlink:  http://tinyurl.com/3xq56e

It is the version with the name flac-1.2.0a.exe.  It works fine on my computer.  This software has two components:
1. FLAC Frontend, this does the encoding and decoding.
2. FLAC Tester, with this component, you can test encoded FLAC files without having them to decode.

I encode the wav files with with the FLAC frontend.  Before I zip the folder (with the FLAC files, the prompts file, the license file and the README file), I check the files with the FLAC tester to be sure that everything went fine.  

Did you try to decode my submitted files with the FLAC frontend?  It should work.  To be sure that there wasn't a submission error, I downloaded the file ralfherzog-20070820_vf18.zip, extracted it, and then used the FLAC front end to decode the FLAC audio files.  It worked.  And the FLAC tester showed that everything was OK.

In short: I am able to decode them correctly.  I don't know why it doesn't work at your computer.  Perhaps it is the version: you tried the version FLAC 1.1.2 and FLAC 1.2.0.  But I am using FLAC 1.2.0a.

Greetings, Ralf

--- (Edited on 8/20/2007 9:41 pm [GMT-0500] by ralfherzog) ---

Hi Ralf,

Yup ... you are right.  Works great on Windows with the FLAC front-end (using flac1.2.0).

Now to figure out why it doesn't work on Fedora (FC4) ...

Ken 

--- (Edited on 8/21/2007 10:10 pm [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---

Hi Ralf,

I tested a few theories, but I can't replicate the error.  I have converted your submission to wav format (using FLAC frontend in Windows XP) and will process that.

But we need to figure out what might be causing this problem if we are ever to automate the process (the processing scripts are all in Linux).

I thought maybe it might be related to Flac tags or Replaygain settings, but I can encode wav files in Windows XP with different combinations of these settings and decode them on Linux (Fedora 4) with no problems (on my dual-booted PC).

Which settings did you use on the FLAC frontend?:

• Encoding level?
• Add tags? automated or custom tags?
  
• Replaygain?
• Align on sector boundaries?
• ...
  

Did you do anything different when you recorded your original wav files in Audacity?

thanks,

Ken 

--- (Edited on 8/22/2007 12:26 am [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---

Hello Ken!

I didn't change anything in the FLAC front-end.

My configuration is:

- encoding level: 6
- add tags: yes (this is the default configuration, I don't know whether tags are added at all, it is possible that I get an error message during encoding, but I am not sure.  But in the end, it works out fine, so I don't care whether tags are added or not.)
- replay gain: yes.
- align on sector boundaries: no

It is the exactly same configuration of the FLAC front-end like in the following picture:

http://tinyurl.com/2mnu45

I didn't do anything different when recording the files with audacity.  I did the same procedure as always.

I will continue to submit in the FLAC format, because I am planning to submit bigger zip files with more audio files in it.

I have one idea why you might get problems: did you try to decode my submitted FLAC files without extracting the zip folder first?  Perhaps this is the reason for your problem? Perhaps it is impossible to decode from FLAC to wav when the audio files are inside the compressed ZIP container?

Greetings, Ralf

--- (Edited on 8/22/2007 12:06 am [GMT-0500] by ralfherzog) ---

> didn't change anything in the FLAC front-end.

> didn't do anything different when recording the files with audacity.  I did the same procedure as always.

That is what I figured ... hmm 

>I have one idea why you might get problems: did you try to decode my submitted FLAC files without extracting the zip folder first? 

On Linux I use FLAC on the command line, and it does not work with zip or tar.gzipped files.

>I will continue to submit in the FLAC format, because I am planning to submit bigger zip files with more audio files in it.

Please try at least one submission using Linux Audacity and Flac on Linux.   I am thinking that somehow there is a Windows to Linux conversion issue.

Another option would be to use Audacity's "export to Flac" option - in Windows or Linux (I think this option is only included in the newer releases of Audacity), and see if that makes a difference.

thanks,

Ken

--- (Edited on 8/22/2007 8:35 am [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---

Hi

This problem has been fixed ... it was a user error (i.e. me) see this post for details.

Ken 

--- (Edited on 8/22/2007 8:51 am [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---