Computer Audio Asylum

Posted by andy_c (A) on June 14, 2008 at 21:21:48

In Reply to: RE: The Myth of Foobar 0.8.3 posted by Scrith on June 14, 2008 at 19:03:40

A month or so ago, fmak posted that he had conversion errors trying to decode a FLAC file that had been encoded with a newer FLAC version than that of his decoder. I don't remember the exact details, but I believe it was a high res file.

Well, just recently I lent a friend of mine a data CD of FLAC files, encoded with FLAC version, 1.2.1, which was the latest the last time I checked. These were all 16/44.1k files. He tried burning an assortment music CD with some of the files I sent him, but had a decoding error when converting some of the FLAC files to WAV. It turns out that he was using an older version of flac.exe than what I encoded them with. I told him to update to the latest flac.exe, and that fixed his decoding problem.

So now you have old foobar versions floating around with old libFLAC libraries statically linked to the executable. Guess what? There is now no longer a guarantee that the old libFLAC will properly decode FLAC files created with the latest FLAC encoder. So I suppose you could maintain both old and new versions of flac.exe. Decode with the newest, and re-encode with a version no newer than that used by the libFLAC of foobar 0.8.3. Have fun with that one.