Do you use FLAC or WAVPACK?
Reply #43 – 2006-04-24 12:11:43
can someone fill me in about this supposed "slowness" of FLAC tags? guruboolez keep repeating it, but the reference encoder puts in 4k of padding by default, and you can change that in the unlikely event you really need more. with proper padding all metadata edits are instantaneous. Josh Hi, the problem I mentionned is maybe a consequence of a bad support of padding in several application. It was the case in the past at least. For example, it's only after I complained about it three years ago that Case introduced padding support in the dedicated diskwriter component of foobar2000:http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ndpost&p=126256 It also seems that foobar2000 improved tag editing inside flac, vorbis and mp3 - which should imply that previous versions where not so good (it has to be confirmed though). I also remember other applications I tested some time ago (was it Tag & Rename , I can't say anymore) which doesn't take advantage at all from existing padded area. So if I'm not wrong, to be a working solution padding must be supported by tagging editors and it's (or was) not apparently always the case. Such issue doesn't exist with tags located at the end, even with poor tagging software. I complained for another reason: I was used to add several tagging fields inside lossless encodings. In a not-so-old past, my favorite hobby was to add EAC's extraction log file as a dedicated field. Because .log files are 4...10 kb long the 4kb padding size was by far not enough. I finally leave this bad habit because it causes annoying issue on memory usage (foobar2000 took -database loaded in RAM- 120.000 Kb... and not all files were tagged or present in the library ). Nonetheless, as I reported it in fb2k forum 2 days ago, there's a common (I'd say) situation where 4Kb is not enough: it's flac+cue situation in where one single file must endure the charge of information usually splitted in multiple tracks. For example, when I encoded two days ago a mono disc for testing WavPack 4.4, I did first in flac format as single albumfile and by using freedb information only. Here's the result (log by frontah):FLAC, Vendor: sjeng.org libFLAC 1.1.2.1 20060107 513.583 kbit/s, 16 bit, 44100 Hz, Stereo Length: 46:12.760 Filesize: 177 975 519 bytes (169.73 MB) Uncompressed: 466.29 MB (36.40%) -------- Tags -------- Vorbis (207 items, size: 11 323 bytes) Not only the file had to be rewritten just after the encoder finished its job, but if I add a new field to the basic ones, the file has to be written again for a third time because the padding reservoir is already vanished... That's why I suggested to foobar2000 developers to: - use more than 4Kb padding when a user set the converter to "create a single file with cuesheet" - add a new padding reservoir when the first one is full A second situation where tags located at the beginning are possibly boring: adding cover (usually more than 10 kb) inside a file... Once embedded (and files rewritten), there's still no padding anymore and each tags revision implies a new happy moment of rewritting. With large storage capacity of modern HDD and with masstagging software, a simple revision of all files (i.e. convert "NUMBEROFCD to "TOTALDISCS") may took a complete afternoon, with possible corruption (if the app. crashes) but only 15 minutes with APEv2. You see the problem? So I don't think people have to use tags in an extravagant manner to be annoyed by FLAC tagging system. But with foobar2000 0.9 I admit that my daily tagging experience is much more positive than in the past (excepted for CD image, to be avoided unless stoic patience ) EDIT: I'm using 16384 kb of padding with flac. Could you tell me if there's a limit for padding? I thought I read once 16 or 32 Kb as limit, but I didn't found the information again.