Hi all I've got a transcoding issue that's going to be difficult to explain, so please pay attention! :)
Most of my music is stored as whole album FLAC files with separate CUE files. Most of my ripping was done with EAC. I'm trying to convert a few hundred of my favourite tracks to MP3, for loading onto the hard disk of my car's head unit (a MyGig unit in a Chrysler). This is an easy task, and I've done similar things many times for other purposes (MP3 players etc). What I've done: - I've made a playlist of the individual tracks in Foobar, by loading all the CUE sheets into one 'whole library' playlist and then copying the individual tracks to a 'For the Car' playlist. - I've then set the Foobar converter to output MP3 Preset:Standard files. This all goes very smoothly, and the resulting tracks play perfectly on the original PC inside Foobar. But (and now the complications start) some of these MP3s have a short but loud burst of static at the start when played on the car's head unit. At first I was convinced that this must be a tagging issue, and that the head unit was interpreting some unrecognised tag fields/format as music. In fact, using another converter (Easy CD-DA Converter) I was able to convert the same FLAC file to an MP3 that did not have this static problem, so this made me even sure that it was a tagging issue - perhaps the Easy CD-DA tag settings were different to the Foobar tag settings. But after much experimenting with different tag schemes I've proved to myself that it's NOT a tagging issue. It seems as though Foobar is putting some inaudible information into the raw audio (PCM?) which is then being encoded into the MP3, and while this is skipped/inaudible on various PC music players, it IS audible when played back by the car's player. I've proved this as follows: - I used both Foobar and Easy CD-DA to extract a single track to WAV from the original whole album FLAC. When played back on the PC, neither WAV file has the static noise. - I then used Foobar to encode both WAV files to MP3, bith with identical settings (tagging, bitrates etc). Again when played back on the PC, neither MP3 file has the static noise. - BUT... when played on the car's player, the MP3 encoded from the Foobar WAV file HAS the static noise, while the MP3 encoded from the Easy CD-DA WAV file does NOT. I don't believe that WAV files can contain any tags (indeed there is no sign of any when I inspect the two WAV files) so it looks as though the Foobar WAV file has something extra in it that encodes as static noise. Looking at the raw audio of both WAV files in Goldwave I can see no difference. In fact the file size if the Foobar WAV file is slightly SMALLER than the other one, suggesting there is LESS in there, rather than additional static data. So clearly this is an issue with my car's player (since the noise isn't present in any of my PC players. And clearly I have a workaround (by using Easy CD-DA Extractor). But I'm curious what Foobar could be doing different/wrong/non-standard. I have (or did have) total faith that Foobar does everything properly, but what could it be doing that Easy CD-DA does differently and that my car's player doesn't deal with properly? Could it be misinterpreting the CUE sheet and extracting a FLAC frame that it shouldn't? If so, why is this not played by any PC player? Not the most urgent issue in the world, obviously, but I'm interested if anyone knows enough about Foobar's handling of FLACs and CUEs. -- chill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ chill's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10839 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=66636 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
