How to Export to FLAC with Padding?

[Gale_Andrews]

@AudioSpirit

@Gale Andrews

See Exporting to an External Program - Audacity Manual.Gale

I already saw all that documentation about FLAC (top to bottom!), and I didn’t find anything to keep (keyword here) what there is there already, which is what I want, because I’m using this on a chain in hundreds of files.

Sorry, I did not understand by “I already tried to edit a chain in which I export to FLAC, but it does not allow to add parameters either” that a Chain was mandatory to what you are doing.

Chains don’t allow modification of metadata when exporting (though if you apply a Chain to files the existing metadata in those files is retained).

And Chains don’t have an “Export (external program)” command.

@AudioSpirit

That option you refer only allows to add new tags, but since I’m processing it automatically in a chain, I can’t know that through Audacity in order to pass that info to the external encoder.

Yes - Audacity Manual does say in a green box

Metadata Editor does not appear before command-line exports, nor are any tags it already contains passed to the external program.

@AudioSpirit

In fact I’m already padding with the option you mention, as I said on my first post here. But I’m having to do it outside of Audacity - I’m using the FLAC encoder through MusicBee, which allows us to create any command line and pass it to the encoder, while keeping the current tags. So it is possible to do it, but I don’t know how.

I’m sure it’s possible, but Audacity cannot do it yet. All (external program) could do is read the contents of Metadata Editor. This is a problem for projects containing multiple files because we do not yet have metadata-reading per track. So, Metadata Editor contains metadata only for the last file imported into the project window.

Do you want to “vote” for an enhancement that (external program) reads the contents of Metadata Editor? This still raises issues of how to handle a user adding the same tag with another value than is already present. Vorbis Comments that FLAC uses are OK with multiple instances of a tag with different values, but that may be a problem for other tagging systems.

Do you also want to “vote” for Chains supporting “Export (external program)”?

“Voting” is just a tally we keep that lets the developers know how “popular” requests are. It doesn’t necessarily mean a feature will be implemented.

@AudioSpirit

All in all, I think I will have to continue doing things the way I currently do it.

1. Do the audio processing (Trim Silence, Normalise, etc.) with Audacity and export to Wav
2. Apply WaveGain
3. Export to FLAC adding padding with MusicBee
4. Finally, add all the tags with Mp3Tag from the original version, before processing.

Since I foind out that the ReplayGain Plug-in is now automatic, I was willing to givbe it a try.
And if it works the way I need it, I would be be able to do all of this in only one step if I could keep all the tags!

Steve’s ReplayGain Nyquist plugin can be added to an Audacity Chain (if that is what you mean).

And as I said, a Chain applied to files (not to projects) should retain the current metadata.

So, can you then use metaflac.exe that comes with the Windows FLAC binaries http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/flac/flac-1.3.1-win.zip? You could make a batch script to run metaflac.exe on a list of files or a folder of files.


Gale