Messy Cover Art in MoodeAudio 4.3

[TheOldPresbyope]

My position is that a FLAC-encoded file isn't a FLAC file if it doesn't have the specified header even if some software apparently ignores the contradiction. To me, it's perfectly proper for the Zend framework to enforce the specification.

I'm not sure there's a simple way to repair the files. My first attempt using dd to overwrite the first 4 bytes of one seemed to succeed syntactically but the resulting file wasn't recognized by the audio tools. I'll look into this further if I can find the time but no promises.

I don’t think it’s raising the bar too high to support only standard format files.

Fortunately it looks like there’s a relatively easy fix:

https://community.bose.com/t5/SoundTouch.../td-p/8395

I was going to suggest converting to Apple lossless and back with XLD which would be automated but I don’t know if it’d work or not.

Great find, @swizzle 

Once the coffee cleared away my morning fog, I realized this "explains everything™".

@Dig-It's files actually do contain ID3V2 tags in addition to the FLAC-specified VORBIS_COMMENT block. I thought file was basing its report simply on the magic number. Naively changing the magic number using dd wouldn't remove the ID3V2 blob, which is why my quick-n-dirty fix didn't work. I still don't know why tools like metaflac are blind to the presence of this "foreign" data but I suspect the same mechanism underlies an earlier issue regarding coverart I was exploring back in June when I ran out of time. 

So, after installing the latest version of MP3tag in PlayOnLinux (which is a bore, but booting into Win10 to run it natively is a bigger bore) I tried the suggested fix on one of @Dig-It's files whose cover art was not displaying in moOde's Playback panel. After the fix, the file begins with "fLaC", as hoped, and is shorter by almost 5K bytes, presumably the ID3V2 tags. Hey nonny nonny, the fixed file displays its cover art!

Bottom line: This fix works but it's a multi-click manual process per file. I wonder if there's a way to automate it?

Regards,
Kent

PS - As an aside, I wouldn't be surprised if MP3tag were the program which created the dual tagging in the first place. The trouble with "Swiss Army knife" software is it can cut and poke one in unexpected ways