Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they? (Read 11986 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Recently, I discovered that nearly every single music file I had in the Apple Lossless format (m4a) was corrupt.  iTunes won't play them; Winamp won't play them; foobar2000 won't play them.  (foobar does offer a clue in its error message:  it says "Unable to open item for playback (Unsupported format or corrupted file (moov box not found))"  This makes sense to me in that I know that the "moov box" is an mp4 thing (and that "m4a" uses an mp4 "container").  That's the extent of my knowledge, I'm afraid.

As to what corrupted the files, the likely suspects are mp3gain or Tunebite.  I did process some songs with them in the last month or so, although I don't remember trying to process, for instance, all my apple lossless files.  I had given up and was already beginning to rerip some of the CDs.

The odd thing is -- I just installed Songbird 1.1.1, and Songbird has no problem with them whatsoever.  Plays them right through, just like normal.

Does anyone have any idea of what's going on here?  Is there any way that I can fix all my .m4a files without having to start over? 

Thank you, folks.


Erling

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #1 –
Well, it is really hard to give advice to somebody who has actually processed Apple Lossless files with mp3gain and tunebite (?!) and can't really remember which process touched all of his files. That's so off, it could be a million reasons. The cause of all has probably already vanished behind the event horizon, unreachable for us. Try if you can find a converter program which doesn't choke on them and convert to flac and back.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #2 –
Yes, it is pretty hard to come up with a solution when multiple things have been done to your lossless files.  In MP3Gain's defense, it doesn't support Apple lossless files.  The AACGain option only supports AAC files so you mess with ALAC files at your own risk.  I am not sure what Songbird's capabilities are but I would follow rpp3po's advise and try to convert your ALAC files to some other lossless format (FLAC, WavPack, etc.) and then convert those lossless files back over to ALAC.
 

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #3 –
I believe some program has tagged your files with ID3v2 tags. Remove them and all should be well.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #4 –
If stripping whatever tags doesn't solve your problem, does Songbird have the ability to decode the lossless stream to a wav file, or transcode to FLAC or right back to Apple Lossless? That would be your easiest way out.
God kills a kitten every time you encode with CBR 320

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: timcupery on
If stripping whatever tags doesn't solve your problem, does Songbird have the ability to decode the lossless stream to a wav file, or transcode to FLAC or right back to Apple Lossless? That would be your easiest way out.


Songbird doesn't have those capabilities, unfortunately.  It's meant more as an open-source iTunes killer.  I had the idea to burn a CD from these files, then reimport them, but Songbird doesn't yet offer burning capability.

I've tried getting at the tags with dbPoweramp, Fixtunes, and mp3tag.  Fixtunes doesn't recognize the files; the other two programs say that the files don't *have* any tags -- though Songbird is clearly reading metadata of some kind. In Songbird, you can delete the contents of the various fields in the metadata, but you can't just delete the whole tag. 

I posted a note in the Songbird forum saying, "Wow, your program wasn't fazed by these corrupt files!  By the way, how'd you *do* that?"  In response I got a self-congratulatory note from one of the Songbird developers, saying, "Yeah, Songbird is just that cool!"  Yeah, fine, but I'd like to *fix* these files, or at least understand what's wrong with them . . .

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #6 –
Isn't songbird based on VLC + Firefox? Maybe see if VLC can play them - if it can, it has a transcode/export function which may be of use.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #7 –
Songbird is based on Gstreamer nowadays if I'm not mistaken, which is Gnome's multimedia framework.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Brent on
Songbird is based on Gstreamer nowadays if I'm not mistaken, which is Gnome's multimedia framework.


I think Gstreamer may be the relevant factor! 

I hadn't yet tried these files in my Linux (Ubuntu via Wubi) installation.  Totem, Rhythmbox, and the .deb version of Songbird had no problem with them; VLC and Audacious wouldn't read them.  The first three all use the Gstreamer framework; the last two don't.  Perhaps the tags of the "corrupt" files got changed in a way that only Gstreamer apps could read them, or perhaps Gstreamer apps are more flexible in the way they look for and read metadata in a file.

Using SoundConvert in Linux, I was able to convert *all* of these files into .ogg.  Back in Windows, I used BonkEnc to convert the .ogg files back into Apple Lossless. 

My reason for wanting to use ALAC in Windows was because that appears to be the only lossless format iTunes will read.  While I can rig my other media players (Winamp, foobar2000, Songbird, MediaMonkey -- am I forgetting any?) to read ALAC, I can't get iTunes to read FLAC or OGG.  iTunes in Windows is a terrible memory hog, and I don't like the way Apple applications tend to take control over your user experience (this coming from an original 512k Mac user!) but I stubbornly hold onto iTunes for its no-brainer library management abilities:  you burn and/or add your tunes via iTunes, and they get sorted and filed in folders appropriately.  My goal is to have an iTunes-free Windows system, but I haven't yet hit upon the right combination of players, taggers, and library managers.

Many thanks to those who responded to this thread.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #9 –
ALAC > ogg > ALAC != lossless any more....

Why not just convert the ALAC to AAC or MP3 - iTunes is compatible with both.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #10 –
Do you mean Ogg FLAC ?

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #11 –
Quote from: ffooky on
Do you mean Ogg FLAC ?


Well, that was dumb.  This is what I get for jumping in the deep end of the pool.

I think this program, Gnome SoundConverter, converted the files into Ogg Vorbis -- which is lossy, right?  FLAC is also an option in this program; I should have converted them into FLAC, then into ALAC . . .

My goal was, in fact, to preserve the original "losslessness" of the files.



All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #12 –
Update:  Went back to the drawing board, tried extremely hard to repair the injured ALAC files while preserving the lossless quality.  I used the following conversions; all began in Linux using Gnome SoundConverter (which could read the injured files due to its Gstreamer base):

1.  In Linux, injured ALAC ----> FLAC; in Windows, FLAC ----> ALAC via dBPoweramp.  Tried also via GX Transcoder.  (Couldn't find an ALAC codec for BonkEnc.) Conversion seemed to work, but iTunes would *not* recognize the resulting files.

2.  In Linux, injured ALAC ----> WAV; in Windows, imported WAV via iTunes.  Worked fine, but I decided I didn't want to deal with the massive retagging project this would entail. 

3.  In Linux, injured ALAC ----> FLAC; in Windows, FLAC ----> WMA lossless via dbPoweramp, then imported WMA files into iTunes, converting them into ALAC in the process (iTunes default for importing WMA).  Seemed to work fine, but the resulting files in iTunes were heavily damaged:  they tended to play at twice the intended speed, some were truncated, some were audio gibberish:  bizarre!

4.  In Linux, injured ALAC ----> FLAC; in Mac OS X, FLAC ----> ALAC via Max. Tried also via XLD.  Conversion seemed to work, but iTunes wouldn't read the files.

5.  Gave up on on trying to preserve losslessness.  In Linux, injured ALAC ----> Ogg Vorbis; in Windows, Ogg Vorbis ---> to AAC (m4A) via dBPoweramp.  ITunes imported these fine; all metadata preserved.

One thing I didn't try:  In Linux, injured ALAC ----> FLAC; in Mac OS X, FLAC ----> AIFF, which iTunes would have imported -- but would AIFF preserve metadata?

But I'm content with the results of my efforts and staying up way too late (wife wasn't too happy with me):  my hundreds of injured files are now safely repaired (if no longer lossless) and accessible to all of my media players in Windows, Linux, and Mac, so I'm satisfied.  Now I'll need to find something else to compulsively spend too much time investigating and dealing with . . .

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #13 –
Well they are not repaired. If you converted to OGG, why do you go back to ALAC? This is just a waste of space. Sound Quality doesn't improve with that.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #14 –
Why on Earth would you go lossless -> lossy -> lossy rather than just going from ALAC -> MP3 in Linux ?

If by any chance you have Media Rage you could (possibly) export the metadata (maybe you'd have to go ALAC -> FLAC first), then ALAC -> WAV, WAV ->ALAC and reimport the metadata.

Is there a tool for Linux that can export/import metadata ?

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #15 –
Quote from: ffooky on
Why on Earth would you go lossless -> lossy -> lossy rather than just going from ALAC -> MP3 in Linux ?


At the moment, I don't have an mp3 encoder installed in Linux -- though I don't think that's difficult to do . . .

I'm also under the impression that AAC is better than mp3?

Quote from: ffooky on
If by any chance you have Media Rage you could (possibly) export the metadata (maybe you'd have to go ALAC -> FLAC first), then ALAC -> WAV, WAV ->ALAC and reimport the metadata.

Is there a tool for Linux that can export/import metadata ?


Good question -- will report if/when I find one.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #16 –
Quote from: Erling on
I'm also under the impression that AAC is better than mp3?


Well, that's a moot (UK) point but lossily encoding a lossily encoded file is just a bad thing to do.

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #17 –
Quote from: weaker on
Well they are not repaired. If you converted to OGG, why do you go back to ALAC? This is just a waste of space. Sound Quality doesn't improve with that.


Went from OGG to AAC, not ALAC.  The files are perhaps more "recovered" than "repaired".  A bunch had become corrupt and unreadable in Windows by everything except Songbird, which uses the gstreamer framework.  GnomeSoundconverter also uses gstreamer, so I used that to try to make them readable in Windows, while preserving metadata, while preserving losslessness.  Managed two out of the three.

I'm not an audio expert by any means, and I do sense that I made this more complicated for myself than I needed to -- wouldn't be the first time . . .

All my Apple Lossless files are corrupt -- or are they?

Reply #19 –
Quote
2.  In Linux, injured ALAC ----> WAV; in Windows, imported WAV via iTunes.  Worked fine, but I decided I didn't want to deal with the massive retagging project this would entail.

Quote
5.  Gave up on on trying to preserve losslessness.  In Linux, injured ALAC ----> Ogg Vorbis; in Windows, Ogg Vorbis ---> to AAC (m4A) via dBPoweramp.  ITunes imported these fine; all metadata preserved.

What you could have done (it sounds like it may be too late for this) is use a lossy format like Ogg Vorbis simply as a temporary container for the tag data (meta info), whilst also converting to WAV. Then re-encode WAVs to whatever lossless format you like, say FLAC. Then use foobar2000's > Tagging > "Copy Info Between Files" function to automatically copy the info in the lossy Ogg Vorbis files to the lossless FLAC files. Job done.

That's a PC solution, anyway.
It sounds like you've been rushing headlong into stuff not fully understood. If it's not too late give that a go - but test it on a few test files first!

C.
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)