alac conversion to flac fails

[glum]

hi, downloaded the trial version of dmc last night to see how it would work with converting my alac collection to flac.

I currently have everything in alac and use itunes to sync the ipods. However itunes crashes if you try and convert the alac to aac from one library to another. The alac files are approaching 300gb and obviously wont fit on a 160gb classic.

So the intention was to have one library pointing to the alac and a 2nd library with converted 256k aac (or mp3) files. Select import in the aac library and pickup the xml file for the full alac library and after about 10-15 minutes itunes just exits.

I can stream the alac to the soundbridge using firefly. I want to also stream to my xbox360/ps3 and onkyo 905 so cant use firefly because it isnt upnp/dnla compliant. I also cant use twonkyvision (which is upnp/dnla compliant) but doesnt support alac. So I thought I'd convert the collection to flac and seperately convert the flac to mp3/aac for the ipods (importing the converted mp3/aac into itunes).

I downloaded dmc last night and kicked of a batch convert of my entire alac library. alac -> flac. This morning it had crashed.

So I've tried converting just one album. of the 5 tracks it only converts 3 of of them complaining the other 2 had invalid error chunks.

the files were "alac"'ed using itunes.


any ideas?

[Spoon]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

When you say crashed, what crashed? the whole computer?

[glum]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

no just dmc. First time it just wanst there when I checked (so I didnt get the xxx encoutered a problem and needed to close.

when I do just one album it doesnt crash but the log shows it had issues with 2 of the 5 tracks

[Spoon]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

If iTunes and dBpoweramp both fail, it points to the audio files being corrupted.

[glum]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

itunes crashing is because its crud. it gets several hundred tracks through before it throws in the towel, and well past the album the dmc blobs on.

I dont thing they are related to be honest. itunes can play the tracks fine, they transfer to the ipod fine and they can be played on the ipod fine. I can even stream them to the roku box (after transcoding to wav) and play fine.

I can try and re-encode this particular album and see what happens but I dont think itunes will complain. I can then push it through dmc and see what happens and see if it crashes again.

if it does how can I debug it? dmc seems exactly what I need and other people seem to be able to convert the alac files.

[Spoon]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

When it crashes does it say Music Converter, or CoreConverter?

[glum]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

not sure - I will run it again overnight and make a note if what it throws up.

however.....

I've re-encoded the first cd in my collection - no different to what I did originaly and now dmc seems to be converting the files to flac. The files it did last time are actually a different size to this time. Not much, for example 33,662k now 33,021k, so a tad smaller.

Perhaps there is something wrong with the original alac files. They were encoded with an older version of itunes; 7.1 I think. Maybe that had a bug in that itunes wasnt too bothered about but apple fixed. They never list what they've fixed.


I'm now trying a 2nd album. This has 10 tracks, and tracks 2, 7 and 9 failed :( with the same error:

Error converting to FLAC, 'M:\iTunes Music\AC_DC\Back In Black\03 What Do You Do For Money Honey.m4a' to 'f:\ACDC\back in black\03 What Do You Do For Money Honey.flac'
Error Chunk is out of file. [clMP4Handler::ScanFile]
Unable to decode m4a file (is corrupt or not supported audio type).

Error converting to FLAC, 'M:\iTunes Music\AC_DC\Back In Black\07 You Shook Me All Night Long.m4a' to 'f:\ACDC\back in black\07 You Shook Me All Night Long.flac'
Error Chunk is out of file. [clMP4Handler::ScanFile]
Unable to decode m4a file (is corrupt or not supported audio type).

Error converting to FLAC, 'M:\iTunes Music\AC_DC\Back In Black\09 Shake A Leg.m4a' to 'f:\ACDC\back in black\09 Shake A Leg.flac'
Error Chunk is out of file. [clMP4Handler::ScanFile]
Unable to decode m4a file (is corrupt or not supported audio type).

jeez I hope I dont have to re-encode my entire 600+ cds :(


is there an alac fixer-upper or is that only for post flac > alac conversion?

[glum]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

I tried the m4a optimize and get the same problem

Error converting to [m4a Optimize], 'M:\iTunes Music\AC_DC\Back In Black\03 What Do You Do For Money Honey.m4a' to 'M:\iTunes Music\AC_DC\Back In Black\03 What Do You Do For Money Honey.IGNORE'
Error Chunk is out of file. [clMP4Handler::ScanFile]
Unable to decode m4a file (is corrupt or not supported audio type).

Error converting to [m4a Optimize], 'M:\iTunes Music\AC_DC\Back In Black\07 You Shook Me All Night Long.m4a' to 'M:\iTunes Music\AC_DC\Back In Black\07 You Shook Me All Night Long.IGNORE'
Error Chunk is out of file. [clMP4Handler::ScanFile]
Unable to decode m4a file (is corrupt or not supported audio type).

Error converting to [m4a Optimize], 'M:\iTunes Music\AC_DC\Back In Black\09 Shake A Leg.m4a' to 'M:\iTunes Music\AC_DC\Back In Black\09 Shake A Leg.IGNORE'
Error Chunk is out of file. [clMP4Handler::ScanFile]
Unable to decode m4a file (is corrupt or not supported audio type).


ah well, looks like crappy itunes has given me invalid alac tracs. DAMM YOU APPLE!

Guess I'll be ripping my tracks to flac now. for the third time :(

[Spoon]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

If you want to send one of the smaller ALAC files I will look:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/email.htm

[glum]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

\o/ I'll send it when I get home tonight.

I also had a thought in the shower. I ripped a couple of CDs over the weekend using the lastest version of itunes. I'll flac one of those and see if it goes through. If it does then it looks like an older version of itunes (which I used for the majority of my library) was writing invalid alac files.

[glum]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

converted an album which I have previously alac'd a few days ago and the conversion to flac worked.

looking more and more like itunes didnt create files properly on an older version.

Spoon, I've sent one of the above culprit files for you to have a look t

[glum]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

outlook never emailed the file. oops. will resend tonight.

[angus2]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

hello,
same problem too (Error Chunk is out of file).

It come from "alac files" compressed with "ItunesEncode" and EAC.

No problem with "eac wav files" compressed in alac manualy with itunes.

It's look like itunesencode or eac add some craps to the wav file before sending it to itunes, very strange.

When reversing "alac file" to "wav file" the final "wav file" is a little bigger than the original (33149 Ko vs 33167 Ko by example).

[Spoon]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

Does the conversion fail angus? or the file is just larger?

[angus2]

Re: alac conversion to flac fails

Does the conversion fail angus? or the file is just larger?

The conversion with dbpoweramp fail with message "Error Chunk is out of file".
The same conversion with itunes is OK but the file is larger.