On 16/11/2007, Brian Willoughby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It would actually be punitive to expect the flac code to expect and > adapt to nonsensical WAVE files.
You say "punitive". I say it would be "reliable". One missing byte is a huge burden and nonsensical? People post on this list looking for solutions. They don't want to become experts in the WAV format (including the undocumented parts). They just want to compress their audio without losing any of the original (you know, LOSSLESS). And if some of their original isn't included in the archive, they want an exit code to indicate a problem and not that everything is okay. Imagine if Sony, Pioneer and other hardware player manufacturers were so quick to reject "nonsensical" audio. Can you imagine if your car CD player was so finicky? How do you think real world customers would react? They don't want to hear excuses about format, they just want a product to work. Sorry if that "just work" expectation is too "punitive" for you. > If the problem is common, then report the bug to the makers of the > programs which produce the bad WAVE files, tell your customers to > switch to compliant programs, As I have stated before on this list, that is a completely unrealistic fantasy. I have yet to find a customer who favorably responds to being told to change their tools. Dumping the uncooperative vendor is generally much easier. Customers don't want excuses, they want solutions. And as pointed out before, sometimes recordings get interrupted. If a recording device loses power it may not be able to write an even number of bytes or update the header size. Sending bug reports to the manufacturer won't help. Nor will they help in cases where the hardware is no longer being developed. In the real world, not all WAVs are perfect. That will never change. I have spent many, many hours scripting around the various gotchas that occur when you use flac to archive WAV and need some certainty that the original WAVs will actually be recoverable. The recently added --keep-foreign-metadata option was a big step forward and a Great improvement. In the past Flac failed to generate error codes to indicate problems with WAV files that might prevent correct archiving. As a result much scripting and testing of the archive was required. Recent flac versions are much better (thanks to Josh for the improvements!). Though I doubt I'll drop the exhaustive attempts at verifying correctness. > and/or write your own software which > processes WAVE files looking for these kinds of errors and repairs > them. If you receive the files via uploads, it would probably be > possible to have this step run automatically. For many of us who produce terabytes of audio masters, modifying them is not an option. The potential for introducing flaws is too great. Simply stating "reject them" is not a solution. FL _______________________________________________ Flac mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac
