I was recently told that Audio Identifier would be a good program to check the encoding of my lossless FLAC files along with the bitrate. When I tag my albums I use foobar and edit artist, album, title, tracks, tracks total, disc, disc total, year, genre, and comment. I then proceed by tagging the album front cover to each file using foobar2000 (in 500x500). When I check these files in Audio Identifier I get an error in files and a bad bitrate. However, when I remove the album artwork to the files the Audio Identifier then begins to report bitrates and encoding settings. With album art attached, both foobar2000 integrity verification and AudioTester report fine files.
My question is: Is there a way to get Audio Identifier to work with FLAC files with images attached to them? Are images attached to FLAC files bad? Lastly, are my checking of FLAC files with fb2k and AudioTester good, or is there a better program?
Thank you very much.
My guess is that Audio Identifier simply does not support embedded artwork (at all or properly). You can trust foobar2000 to tag files properly, and I believe its Integrity Verifier supports checksums within FLAC rather than simply reporting whether the decoder fails irretrievably. I can’t comment on AudioTester. If you wanted the possibility of the most verbose report during decoding, I think the official command-line decoder for FLAC would offer the most feedback. However, fb2k and AudioTester should be perfectly fine for normal usage.