#419 ERROR reading foreign metadata

[Behzad Eslami Tehrani]

I'm trying to reduce my Nuendo projects using flac.
I use this command to create a flac file:
flac -8 --keep-foreign-metadata -f -V "Audio 04_01.wav"
but the result is :
ERROR reading foreign metadata: invalid WAVE file: unexpected EOF (010)
When I remove --keep-foreign-metadata switch I get:
Audio 04_01.wav: WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk 'bext' (use --keep-foreign-metadata to keep)
Audio 04_01.wav: WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk 'Fake' (use --keep-foreign-metadata to keep)

I've no idea what are those sub-chunks but I don't want to lose any metadata.

I really appreciate your help!
Thanks!

[lvqcl]

Difficult to say where's a problem without the file. You can create a small WAV file that has this problem, upload it somewhere and post a link to it.

[Behzad Eslami Tehrani]

You can find a sample file here

Thank you!

[lvqcl]

Here's what sndfile-info prints:

---

File : Audio 04_01.wav
Length : 6097797
RIFF : 6097789
WAVE
bext : 802
fmt  : 16
  Format        : 0x1 => WAVE_FORMAT_PCM
  Channels      : 1
  Sample Rate   : 44100
  Block Align   : 3
  Bit Width     : 24
  Bytes/sec     : 132300
*** Fake : 2 (unknown marker)
data : 6096933
End
----------------------------------------
Sample Rate : 44100
Frames      : 2032311
Channels    : 1
Format      : 0x00010003
Sections    : 1
Seekable    : TRUE
Duration    : 00:00:46.084
Signal Max  : 1.37725e+006 (-15.69 dB)

---

So, RIFF chunk size is odd (and also there's no padding byte for data chunk).

That's why FLAC --keep-foreign-metadata fails: it implicitly expects it to be even.

I'm not sure how to properly fix it. Anyone?

[Behzad Eslami Tehrani]

Thanks for information.

[Erik]

You should be able to use the sndfile-convert program to convert it into something usable, eg:

sndfile-convert Audio 04_01.wav new-file.wav

and that new file should work.

[Erik]

Did you try the suggestion I made on 2014-11-30?

[Behzad Eslami Tehrani]

Hello,
Thank you for your concern.
Yes I did, but the same happened:

sndfile-convert "Audio 04_01.wav" new-file.wav
flac -8 --keep-foreign-metadata -f -V "new-file.wav"

Output:
new-file.wav: ERROR reading foreign metadata: invalid WAVE file: unexpected EOF(010)

I also used sndfile-convert.exe for flac conversion and it worked,but it seemed that sndfile-convert.exe did not keep the meta-data.
I did the following to find out whether the meta-data were still there:

sndfile-convert "Audio 04_01.wav" sndfile-out.flac
sndfile-convert sndfile-out.flac sndfile-out.wav
flac -8 -f -V sndfile-out.wav

when I used flac.exe to convert the original file without --keep-foreign-metadata, I received the following warnings:

Audio 04_01.wav: WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk 'bext' (use --keep-foreign-metadata to keep)
Audio 04_01.wav: WARNING: legacy WAVE file has format type 1 but bits-per-sample=24
Audio 04_01.wav: WARNING: skipping unknown sub-chunk 'Fake' (use --keep-foreign-metadata to keep)

but when I used flac.exe to convert sndfile-out.wav the output was just:

sndfile-out.wav: WARNING: legacy WAVE file has format type 1 but bits-per-sample=24

and there was no sign of other warnings ('bext' and 'Fake' sub-chunks). They had been deleted by sndfile-convert.exe while converting to flac and again converting to wave.
I have no idea about those strange meta-data and I don’t know whether they are really important or I can just simply ignore them.

Thank you.