[SOLVED] MPD Error failed to decode flac ._ file

[TheOldPresbyope]

@ziofaggio 

I have downloaded and tested the two files you PM'ed to Tim, Al, and me. I find nothing wrong with them either in their music encoding or the metadata.

I copied the mp3 and flac files to a new directory on my moOde player, updated the library, and now see in the Library folder view a single album with just two tracks, as expected. There's no ghost file present.

Hence I have to agree with Robert. The evidence suggests you have some of those pesky macOS-generated hidden files on your system.

Regards,
Kent

I copied both files in one folder, updated the library, and only the mp3 file showed up in the album.
Then fixed the album name in the flac file (was "Nell/'assenzio", while on the mp3 it was "Nell'assenzio", without the slash...), updated the library, and was able to see both tracks.
NOTE:
1. the flac file is missing the track number
2. the flac file has an invalid Vorbis date tag - both as tag field name (YEAR) and contents (yyyy-mm-dd rather than only YYYY)

I would also suggest to not use apostrophes (or the like) in file names (in the tags it's fine, of course), as some OSs use them to enclose filenames with spaces, and can get messed up... not mandatory, just my suggestion.

As per your filename with an underscore in its name, most probably is an artifact of MacOS, and probably it is the reason of the error message you got (the file has .flac as extension, the library attempts to decode it as FLAC, but probably it is either corrupted, or a "stupid" file needed by the OS / UI for its purposes.

Not an issue IMO, just (possibly) incorrect / dubious metadata.

Because of the way MPD/moOde "assemble" albums from track info, they think there are two albums involved because of the presence/absence of the reverse solidus in the track metadata. However, that just caused the folder view to show a folder containing two albums entries and two tracks in my player. Whether this is a problem depends on whether one actually wants both the .flac and .mp3 tracks or this was just a test.

True about the track number.

As for the date, metaflac reveals the actual metadata in the file

Code:

kreed@T520:~/Downloads/Luca$ metaflac --list --block-number=2 Luca*.flac
METADATA block #2
 type: 4 (VORBIS_COMMENT)
 is last: false
 length: 143
 vendor string: reference libFLAC 1.3.3 20190804
 comments: 5
   comment[0]: TITLE=Nell\'assenzio
   comment[1]: ARTIST=Luca Dirisio
   comment[2]: ALBUM=Nell\'assenzio
   comment[3]: YEAR=2011
   comment[4]: DATE=2011-07-09

According to the FLAC spec the metadata is to be contained in a VORBIS COMMENT block. The VORBIS spec, in turn, says

Below is a proposed, minimal list of standard field names with a description of intended use. No single or group of field names is mandatory; a comment header may contain one, all or none of the names in this list.

The list does not contain YEAR but does contain DATE with no guidance as to the date representation

DATE

    Date the track was recorded

Note that moOde displays "2011" for both the FLAC and the MP3 tracks provided.

Bottom line, we can quibble about the values in the metadata fields (and I love to do so) and to emphasize the value of regularizing the metadata of all the tracks in one's library but the provided tracks play without issue.

Regards,
Kent