Certain FLACs won't play correctly (perhaps due to high sample rate?)

English Multimedia
1

I’m running the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed, and for a few months now I’ve noticed that a certain album in particular doesn’t play nicely with openSUSE’s distribution of VLC and applications like Elisa which I believe rely on either it or ffmpeg, and this also goes for Packman. It’s only one album in particular, being the FLAC version of the soundtrack for the fan game Sonic Robo Blast 2 (which is freely distributed at Soundtrack « Sonic Robo Blast 2 – Official Website if you’d like to test this out for yourself).
A few things I’ve noticed is that:

  1. In other OSs like Ubuntu or even MacOS, this album plays fine
  2. Weirdly, this album also plays fine on openSUSE Leap 15.4
  3. The terminal output when playing a song from this album is:
VLC media player 3.0.18 Vetinari (revision 3.0.13-8-g41878ff4f2)
[0000561537825ae0] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[00007f20acc170c0] flac decoder error: frame's data did not match the CRC in the footer.
[00007f20acc170c0] flac decoder error: frame's data did not match the CRC in the footer.
[00007f20acc170c0] flac decoder error: frame's data did not match the CRC in the footer.

and it basically just repeats that, though there was also one line that instead said:

[00007f20acc170c0] main decoder error: buffer deadlock prevented

Since this has occurred on my Tumbleweed devices for multiple months, I’d like to figure out what the issue actually is so hopefully it can be resolved. Since it’s really weird that, as I previously pointed out, this only occurs on TW and not Leap, or Ubuntu, or basically anything else.
Thank you!

4

Bumping this since it was unlisted shortly after posting and only just fixed.

5

is normally indicative of a corrupted flac file

which is rather questions that.

However, first ensure that flac is installed, (you may only have libflac) then see what:

flac -wst <filename.flac>

returns

6

Here’s what it returned:

111 - Deep Sea Zone, Act 1.flac: *** Got error code 2:FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ERROR_STATUS_FRAME_CRC_MISMATCH
*** Got error code 2:FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ERROR_STATUS_FRAME_CRC_MISMATCH
*** Got error code 0:FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ERROR_STATUS_LOST_SYNC
*** Got error code 2:FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ERROR_STATUS_FRAME_CRC_MISMATCH
*** Got error code 2:FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ERROR_STATUS_FRAME_CRC_MISMATCH
*** Got error code 0:FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ERROR_STATUS_LOST_SYNC

111 - Deep Sea Zone, Act 1.flac: ERROR while decoding data
                                 state = FLAC__STREAM_DECODER_ABORTED
7

Corrupted file… absolutely no idea why it plays OK on other systems.

Have you tried downloading it again?

8

Yes. I have downloaded it many times :sweat_smile:

I have also reinstalled OSs multiple times to check. Tumbleweed always fails to play it, while nothing else does—not even Leap.

9

Leap and Ubuntu use an old flac-1.3.2/1.3.4 version. Tumbleweed uses an up to date flac-1.4.3.

With flac-1.4.0 major fixes for flac handling where introduced. Thats the reason why your file gets detected as corrupted. See changelog for flac-1.4.0:

10

I see. I’ll try testing this with a distro that also uses flac-1.4.0+.

11

For easier search which distro uses which version of flac:
https://pkgs.org/download/flac

12

I’ve just downloaded “srb2-flac.zip” which has a sha1 checksum of: 7e2f46bc4615bc2e2839eae0c252113ae96ac17c

Unzipped it is some 60 individual flac files, have I downloaded the correct file?

Testing (using flac -wst) the first 3 files they are OK and VLC plays them.

13

Using flac 1.3.2, not at my TW machine at the moment…

14

Alright, tested on EndeavorOS which was using FLAC 1.4.2, and the same issue occurs. Therefore, I think it is safe to say that it is a problem with either this album or FLAC, likely the former.

15

I don’t know what success you are likely to have, but you could try contacting the file provider and ask that they re-encode using the latest flac (1.4.2) version.

16

Definitely.

Thanks for the help!

17

I have:

Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20221228
KDE Plasma Version: 5.26.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.101.0
Qt Version: 5.15.7
Kernel Version: 6.1.1-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 8 × AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with Radeon Vega Graphics
Memory: 29,3 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Vega 11 Graphics

ffplay plays the album, vlc doesn’t.