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Topic: FLAC tagging slow (rewriting whole files?) (Read 1013 times) previous topic - next topic
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FLAC tagging slow (rewriting whole files?)

Hi guys,

FLAC tagging (writing text tags or adding a 400x400 album art jpeg) is very slow recently. I wonder what has changed. IMO before it just wrote the metadata, but now fb2k seems to rewrite whole FLAC files. Not sure about that yet.
My FLAC files are one file per CD/Album, with embedded CUE.
Anybody aware of a change? fb2k 1.6.11

Thx

Re: FLAC tagging slow (rewriting whole files?)

Reply #1 –
FLAC files have tagging at the beginning of the file, and then it has a padding block to avoid having full rewrite. However, if you change more than there is room for in the padding, you have to rewrite the full file.
Since you have one file per CD, then flac.exe probably has added 64 kilobytes padding upon initial encoding (default for > 20 minutes files because they often are CD images ... for smaller it is 8) - but still, changing some tags and adding art might will sooner or later be (more than) enough.

Also if you have used the "Optimize file layout + minimize file size", then you have killed the padding that was; and if you have used some tagging utility that tries to reclaim padding size the same way.

Re: FLAC tagging slow (rewriting whole files?)

Reply #2 –
Oh thanks for the valuable information, with that in mind, I will have a closer look.

Re: FLAC tagging slow (rewriting whole files?)

Reply #3 –
Also check your disk. I have 2 disks for my music. The first is the main one and the second has various collections downloaded from net.

When I do something to the first it feels like an SSD. For example to sanitize the tags through the addon. When I do the same to the second it is very slow.

A few days ago I tried to move some files and they stalled. When I checked the HDD health I found out that it was not so good.

Re: FLAC tagging slow (rewriting whole files?)

Reply #4 –
OK, I observed some FLAC re-taggings and it works just fine. Sometimes art jpeg is a bit bigger than 64k, which probably was the cause. I think I'll convert future files with 92 or 128kb padding.