A Wee Corner

DSD DIFF file support added to FWL

Mike — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:07:43 +0000

I’ve recently had my collection of SACD’s ripped to native DSD format. While there is a SACD plugin allowing foobar2000 to play the resulting ISO, I’d rather play the individual .DFF files that can be extracted from the .iso file. Of course you can convert the DFF to WAV and then to FLAC and then decode them back to WAV but that seems a bit messy.

So, the FWL program will now copy any .dff files that are selected and add them to the playlist. No other actions are performed and unless you are using foobar with the DSDDIFF plug in I very much doubt this will work for you. Your music player program will need to understand/handle the .dff files.

Download FWL version 1.2 Beta 3.

mp3 support added to FlacWavLoader

Mike — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:02:46 +0000

Yeah… mp3 support. This is strictly a convenience thing as suggested by WGH on AudioCircle.com. It does not decode the mp3 files to wav, it simply copies them and adds them to the play list. I did experiment with converting to wav and perhaps they sound a little better but the standard version of SoX does not contain the needed library to decode them due to licensing restrictions. While I did try adding the needed libmad library and it worked, I thought this too much of a pain for a non techno user.

This code may have added new bugs but it seems stable. I’ve been using it all day at work with no issues. If you find a problem please report it.

FWLSetup_v1.2b2

Wav support added to FlacWavLoader

Mike — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:06:07 +0000

I’ve made some updates to the FWL program to allow copying or upsampling of .wav files. Prior to this release the program would only accept files with a .flac extension. Since I have a few things that were ripped as wave files it seemed the little program should know how to digest these as well.

The new behavior is as follows:

If the selected files have a .wav extension and either SoX is not configured or if the sample rate is set to “Don’t Resample”; the files will simply be copied. If SoX is configured and the sample rate is other than Don’t Resample, the files will undergo SRC per the chosen values.

Download FWLSetup_v1.2b1

I’ve tested all the new bits and believe I’ve quashed the bugs but as usual, please let me know about any errors that you find. Issue Tracker URL: https://bitbucket.org/mgalusha/flacwavloader/issues?status=new&status=open

Mike

FWL 1.1 & SOPA

Mike — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:29:12 +0000

I think I’ve killed the last bug in this version, so I’ve moved it from beta to release status.

FWLSetup v1.1

That brings me to SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act legislation currently in the U.S. House of Representatives and sponsored by the television and movie industry, the same folks who own the companies that distributed the vast majority of software used for pirating their content. Wow, it’s hard to express my feelings for these folks, suffice to say disease and pestilence are the least I wish upon them.

Claims that they are losing billions of dollars in revenue to piracy are, to my mind, vastly overblown. One thing they never seem to mention is each illegal movie download does not equate to lost revenue. A great many of these people would not watch the movie or video if they had to pay for it, so they cannot be equated to lost revenue. No question some would pay but many would not. The reason is simple, the content is often so poor that it’s not worth paying for. I do not condone theft and I make my living writing software, the last thing I want is for someone to steal it but I also would not expect them to pay if the quality was shit.

I purchased a ROKU streamer last month, a very cool device and purchased primarily so we can watch streams provided in association with Amazon Prime. It comes with the Hulu Plus channel. I looked into what this was and decided that while it would be nice to have it’s not worth the $7.99 a month. While some of the content is good, shelling out another $100 a year for yet more commercials is just not something I’m willing to do on top of what we pay for satellite. If it were commercial free, possibly but for the same money I can get netflix and IMO this is a vastly superior option. If I was a network TV junkie perhaps I would be willing to pay for people to try and sell me more shit that is not needed but there is not a chance. This is an example of why people choose to pirate content, paying a fee to be force fed advertisements for content that is not that good in the first place is just stupid. The content providers make nearly all their revenue from advertising and it seems very likely that the content itself is just too poor to entice people to pay for it.

Enough blather for today. Hope you enjoy the FWL utility. Oh yeah, just an FYI, it doesn’t download or connect to the internet in any way, so no worries about the piracy police coming after you for using it. Hopefully you obtained all your music via legal means, the FWL utility is simply a means for providing a local, uncompressed copy at playback time from content you already own.

No virus

Mike — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:37:32 +0000

Per the post about the b3 release, this was packaged into a .exe file to keep IE happy. I has come to my attention that some actually think there is a virus in the .msi versions. There is not, feel free to scan it with anything you like. The problem is that Internet Explorer is warning people because .msi files are not typically downloaded. This is why it has been packaged into a single .exe executable file. What is ironic is that .msi is Microsoft Installer and is what is produced by the Microsoft development environment. Yep, it doesn’t complain about a .exe, which of course can contain anything but it does complain about Microsoft’s own packaging format.

In any event, the files inside the .exe that is downloaded are setup.exe and the .msi file, the package is just to prevent IE from complaining.

FWL version 1.1 beta 3

Mike — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 04:12:01 +0000

Beta 3 has been posted.

Changes:
Added help button for SoX path
Added handler to clear SoX and player paths if user selects cancel when browsing for executable.
Packaged .msi into .exe file as IE finds .msi indigestible even though it’s a Microsoft installer.

2011-12-30 07:15, new build uploaded. Same version, 32 bit compatible installer. Thanks to Martin C. for reporting the problem with the packager.

FWLSetup_v1.1b3.exe

FlacWavLoader version 1.1 beta 2

Mike — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 04:01:32 +0000

A few updates to the previous version.

Added phase response options when resampling
Added status bar showing file being proessed
Bug fix if no files selected and decode button clicked
SoX options disabled if SoX not detected/configured. SoX is no longer required and Flac.Exe will be used if SoX not installed/configured
Cleaned up layout a bit

FWLSetup_v1.1b2.msi

FlacWavLoader with SoX SRC

Mike — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 02:56:53 +0000

Since this program is built to meet my needs I have made some changes demanded by the user community; me.

I’ve been wanting to experiment with high quality re-sampling but like converting from FLAC to WAV, this is a pain when all one wants to do is listen to some music. After viewing the sample rate conversion comparison results on the Infinite Wave site; it seemed like enabling the SoX – Sound eXchange conversion utility would be worthwhile. Since SoX is billed as “the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs” and already does FLAC to WAV conversion, there was no need to convert first and then resample; SoX converts from FLAC to WAV and writes the output at the sample rate and bit depth chosen.

If you would like to try this it can be downloaded below. Please note this requires SoX to be installed, it will fail miserably if this is not installed and the path set. If the current build of SoX is installed in the default directory, the program will find this when you are setting the path. This can be overridden but in almost all cases you will want to use the current version. Of course if you install SoX in a different location, you will need to browse to the executable prior to trying to decode any files. SoX can be downloaded free of charge from the above link.

FWL 1.1 beta

FlacWavLoader

Mike — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:52:10 +0000

On this page you can download a little program I wrote to ease the pain of unpacking an audio file compressed with FLAC to wav format and putting it on the local drive.

You may ask, why on earth would anyone what to do this? After all, FLAC is a lossless compressor and the extracted bits are the same. The reason? In my experience, playback of the raw wav file from a local disk is subjectively better than decoding it on the fly. In addition, playing from the local disk does not incur the overhead of the network and if the system has lots of RAM, the files will be cached and the disk not accessed.

This is freeware, no charge and while you are free to re-distribute the program I encourage you to point anyone wanting a copy to this page. It will likely change often as this an early version. Please note this program contains portions of the FLAC library created by Josh Coalson, please see xiph.org for more information.

Download FlacWavLoader v1.0.3

Program developed and tested on Windows 7. Works on both 32 and 64 bit machines and requires the Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5 SP 1

V1.0.1 – Slight tweak to progress bar, was not resetting to 0 if decode ran second time in same session.
V1.0.2 – Bug fix to handle multi-line comments.
v1.0.3 – Added support for drag and drop file selection.