Hi,
I´m just checking my backup drive bit by bit against my music folder which
contains all those accurately ripped and compressed flac files.
I´m using Total Commander performing this check.
Here the trouble starts.
Some files are not equal, compared bit by bit. But I can´t tell
if it´s just some metadata I changed.
I´m sure flac fingerprint could do the job, but I´m running on W764bit
and I can´t get flac frontend to work on my machine.
Is there a versatile and easy to perform way to compare two
flac files if the audio data is identical (without using flac frontend)?
Thanks in advance
c1c2c3
foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/download) + foo_bitcompare (http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_bitcompare) plugin.
Thanks for your fast reply. Should have read the documentation
of foo bitcompare. Shame on me and big hug to you.
Just to complete this thread: Worked like a charm as soon as
I figured out to mark all tracks to get the menu "compare" inside utils.
Probably would have been faster and just as effective to have simply just run a test decode with flac without it actually writing to your drive (flac -t). Maybe this is too late for the OP, but at least future readers might see this as a more worthwhile (or not) alternative.
Would a test decode always prove that the musical information of
a backup file is the same as the original?
If you decode two lossless encodes of the same source file, then yes, the decoded stream is (and has to be, that's what lossless means!) identical, unless either one of the encoders or the decoder is broken in some way.
Would a test decode always prove that the musical information of a backup file is the same as the original?
If you're concerned about audio data changing from copying a flac to a different location and/or altering its metadata then yes, a test decode does indeed prove that it didn't happen.
As long as the file is not held in a cache, ie you copy File >> some drive, then run decode on said file, it might come from a memory cache not the drive, to be sure you would have to do a full restart of the computer.
Based on the information in the original post, possible caching issues won't apply.