Bulk testing FLAC files

2006-07-31 14:35:09

Hi,

Please forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere! I couldn't find anthing.

There have been many times that I have had to run FLAC Frontend's "Test" feature on a bunch of files. I'm not sure how one is supposed to obtain the results of such a test, short of watching the command line result for every file in real-time and making sure that the result is "ok". The problem is that when all of the files are finished testing, there isn't, for example, a list of files that did not pass testing.

Moreover (and perhaps this can be adjusted, but it wouldn't provide the ideal solution) the history of the Windows command-line window that FLAC Frontend opens up to do the Test only goes back so far. That is, if I have, say 100 files to test, I can't run the Test, come back when it's done, and scroll up all the way to the first one to verify that I see 100 "ok"s. Scrolling to the top of the window will put me, say, at file 80/100. And this clearly isn't the best way to obtain the results of the test, even if I could scroll to the top.

So: anyway to bulk Test a bunch of FLAC files, and obtain the results in a convenient form? Sorry for the newbie question.

Thanks!
David

Bulk testing FLAC files

Reply #1 – 2006-07-31 14:46:57

Is there a way you could append ">> c:\test.log" to the very end your command-line?

That would add the results to c:\test.log instead of showing it in the command-line window.

Bulk testing FLAC files

Reply #2 – 2006-07-31 14:51:45

In addition, the cmd window defaults to a small scrollback.  You can change the default by click on the upper left hand corner (to the left of the path in the window title), and choose Defaults (under win2k, probably similar under winxp).  There you can tweak many options.  Once you do that for one cmd window, it should apply to all further ones.

-brendan

Bulk testing FLAC files

Reply #3 – 2006-07-31 14:56:18

It turns out flac (at least on Linux) doesn't output statistics to stdout; it outputs data to stderr. That means redirection of >> has no effect.

In Linux you can use 2>> to use stderr redirection, but I'm not sure if that still works with Windows' command.com or cmd.exe.

---

I found out that if you use "flac -st" instead of "flac -t" to test, it only shows failures and hides statistics and OKs.

Bulk testing FLAC files

Reply #4 – 2006-07-31 15:08:29

I should indeed have searched more thoroughly. Someone posted a link to a batch file he made that does precisely what I want. Here is a link to the post:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....mp;#entry400038

Thank you Synthetic Soul!

Bulk testing FLAC files

Reply #5 – 2006-08-09 16:58:50

I use FLACTtester. It works pretty good.

Bulk testing FLAC files

Reply #6 – 2006-08-20 17:44:42

Quote from: Cartman_Sr on 2006-08-09 16:58:50

I use FLACTtester. It works pretty good.

While Flactester is a very convinent utility you have to be aware of various situations where it will return errors when there arent actually any problems with the FLAC file itself. An example is if you are scanning a external drive or server that contains FLAC files but doesnt have the FLAC.exe installed. I found this out the hard way and scared the hell out of myself thinking 75% of my files were corrupt.

Just wanted to give a heads up.