Hello all,

Having spent the whole day enthralled with amarok after I got FLAC working (which was fiddly since the Ubuntu edgy packages are a little broken in this respect so I compiled from source) I've discovered a very small proportion of FLAC files (always from the same albums) won't play, they are merely skipped over.

I think this is a different issue to the other thread about FLAC files being skipped since their solution made no difference.

The only thing particular about these files that are being skipped is "file" reports them as using id3 v 2.3.0

NB I'm fairly certain this is a separate issue to other FLAC ubuntu problems since I've recompiled and at least 95% of FLAC files are playing flawlessly, the only ones that aren't are a few albums I downloaded (comment from the EAC logs that came with them "EAC Flac 1.1.1 -8") I can provide samples of offending files if anyone needs them.

Using libxine1.1.2 (ubuntu official package)

Thanks for any help!

Update: Stripping id3v2 tags fixes this problem, so it's just a minor irritation!

Code: Select all

id3v2 -d song.flac

I might be totally off here, but since when are flac files using mp3-id3 tags?

Ah... you've got a point there, I always assumed that FLAC simply used id3 tags (I know nothing about the format)... but looking at this from the FLAC FAQ

What kinds of tags does FLAC support?

FLAC has it's own native tagging system which is identical to that of Vorbis. They are called alternately "FLAC tags" and "Vorbis comments". It is the only tagging system required and guaranteed to be supported by FLAC implementations.

Out of convenience, the reference decoder knows how to skip ID3 tags so that they don't interfere with decoding. But you should not expect any tags beside FLAC tags to be supported in applications; some implementations may not even be able to decode a FLAC file with ID3 tags.

So you can put ID3 tags in FLAC but probably you shouldn't. I've brought this up on #amarok and the helpful people there have told me this is probably a libxine problem so I will post a bug report there.

Just out of curiosity: Which tagging tool writes id3 tags to flac files?
Most tools I know will refuse this and let you just enter vorbiscomments.
For a decoder, the id3 tags will just look like bits that are somehow broken and will skip the file.

These files had clearly been ripped by EAC, and although the log made no mention of it, I do recall EAC having an option to write id3 tags, so in that case they will have been written in addition to FLAC tags by EAC itself.

Also out of interest: is there any way of inputting composer data into a FLAC file? I like to know who wrote the songs I'm listening to...

You can add any tag you like in flac and vorbis files.
e.g. tagtool (http://pwp.netcabo.pt/paol/tagtool/) can do this (at least for vorbis files, not sure about flac), but I guess other tag editors can do so, too.