I didn’t know whether to put this in help in support or 1.8 discussion, but the problem I am having is pretty 1.8 specific and I am sure someone here has to have some sort of answer for me.
I really like all the new features in 1.8 beta. The native .flac support is a feature that I am loving that I had no idea that I even wanted. Because Renoise is pretty much the only music creation software I use now, and also because I am finding 1.8 beta stable enough to use instead of 1.52 final, I began converting a good bulk of my samples (99.9% of which are .wav) to the .flac format. I have seen great results on the folders that work. For instance, the 101 Breakbeat collection shrinks from 768MB in wav format to 454MB (I compressed with flac compression level 6). After seeing this I decided to convert the rest of my folders.
Alot of the samples I have are pretty short in length, nested deeply into different folders for categorization purposes, and very, very numerous. I have been using the UniversalFront frontend to convert my files, simply because the one that comes with the installer for FLAC is finicky about capitalization and so it will recognize .wav and .WAV, but not .Wav or .WaV.
However, whichever frontend I use, there are sometimes one or two or even whole groups of 50 files that just will not convert. I can fix this by loading them into Audacity and exporting them as .wav, but to do this to so many files that are contained deep inside different directories would be a major chore.
Because there is no way that I know to make Audacity open and resave huge batches of files, I decided to try using dBPoweramp to open the .wavs and save them back as .wavs. No matter how I set the conversion, I couldn’t get it to “fix” the file the same way that Audacity does when you open it and resave it.
I was wondering if anyone knew what was wrong with these wav files and if they knew of anyway to fix them so that I could convert them to .flac.
Does the front-end not allow the wav to be converted (front-end checks the wav’s specs) or does the Flac compressor not convert the wav when submitted by the front-end?
Well… In case the front-end is the trouble, the most simplistic alternative manner of converting would be writing your own frontend that will perform the conversion for you.
It might be some of the samples contain loop-points saved along, it might be that the front-end or the Flac compressor does not know how to handle them (front end doesn’t know what to do with the loop data or it forgets to supply a parameter to the flac compressor that a loop is involved thus the Flac compressor skips converting it because it did detected a loop but was not instructed to use it).
I get this whether I test the .wav or try to encode the .wav. Doing the open and re-save trick in Audacity seems to alleviate this though.
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EDIT: DOH! I’m stupid, tried to use the decoder and .flac tester.
EDIT2: Got error “unsupported sample-rate”. I thought I forced a 44.1k samplerate. I went ahead and reconverted them and they worked after that. I will follow this through and give you an update tomorrow if everything works or if anything else comes up.
Sure! Here is a small smattering of the broken .WAVs:
The problem with these files is, that they are in 32bit format, which isn’t officially supported by FLAC. Renoise claims to be the first app, which can compress these, but currently has a compression ratio of 0%, which is probably a bug.
Now I understand. I guess the reason it was working was because I was converting it to 16 bit. Also, I guess Audacity converts to 16 bit by default. I guess I will just wait until the FLAC encoder supports 32 bit conversion.
