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they're not gone, was the file created via piped encoding with fb2k?
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look for an option like -S- or --no-seektable and get rid of it for flac-to-flac encoding. this will allow the seektable to transfer.
you can easily add a seektable back to files that lost it with metaflac --add-seekpoint
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1) does this pipe-enconding in foobar2000 flac-to-flac remove the seektable?
2) are seektables really necessary? what are they for (I find no real use).
FLAC does not require seek points for seeking but they can speed up seeks, or be used for cueing in editing applications.
Encoding with foobar2000 now (since they added "ignore chunk sizes" option in the default command line string in 0.9.5) causes no seekpoints in the resulting file. But, as stated in the quote above, FLAC doesn't require seekpoints for seeking.
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[...]Ok I didn't understand this last part "Use with caution:"[...]
That means everything that foobar2000 considers audio and sends via pipe to flac.exe will be treated as audio by flac.exe. As far as I know, fb2k doesn't send those "data chunks" through pipe to CLI encoders. Tags are added separately from the encoding process, when flac.exe finishes its work and the resulting file is ready.
In other words, no need to worry .
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could you describe a "potential" situation for this to occour?
Like, when you stream wav file's data through pipe and then occurs non-audio data. I personally do not have such WAV files, but they may eventually exist.
C:\>type exotic.wav | flac.exe --ignore-chunk-sizes - -o improper.flac
fb2k won't send such non-audio data, as it parses WAV file before sending to flac.exe (in contrast to the "type" command, which sends all data "as is").
1) does this pipe-enconding in foobar2000 flac-to-flac remove the seektable?
it shouldn't, but maybe foobar is decoding to pcm as an intermediary step, I don't know.
2) are seektables really necessary? what are they for (I find no real use).
seekpoints only speed up seeking, but the default seek algorithm is pretty fast anyway, you'd probably never notice on a pc.
Encoding with foobar2000 now (since they added "ignore chunk sizes" option in the default command line string in 0.9.5) causes no seekpoints in the resulting file.
btw that option has no effect unless the input is wav or aiff.
Yes, fb2k decodes audio and then feeds it to encoder, so the "ignore chunk sizes" option affects the encoding.
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if flac.exe is given a flac file as input, yes, but it doesn't sound like that's how foobar does it.