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  1. Member
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    I have a project in which, as part of the workflow, I need to convert several thousand OGG files to WAV. Most of them convert without issue. But about a fifth of them cannot be recognized.

    All of the trouble OGGs play without issue in e.g. Winamp, Foobar2000 etc., although, curiously, the progress bar does not appear in Foobar. MediaInfo also correctly identifies the files' specifics. But the following software fails to recognize the files as valid: Audacity, Adobe Audition, Reaper, Izotope, Eac3to.

    It seems to me that if there is software that can play a file, software also ought to be able to load the file for editing. So this is truly baffling, especially as I have exhausted every option, including ones that really should have been able to handle this.

    Playing each file individually, recording Windows, and trying to cut and paste the output to recreate what I should be getting from any of the above-listed packages is flatly not an option due to the insurmountable volume of files. Hopefully obviously.
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    Those .OGG files are b0rked (broken), granted.
    Have you already tried to decompress them to .WAVs with ffmpeg? Or with mpv

    If foobar2000 plays them correctly, then probably it can also convert to .WAVs correctly, but you will have to check whether this is true or not
    As for WinAmp: there used to be a DiskWriter plugin which allowed you to record (save as .WAV) "what you play" several times faster than realtime
    "Programmers are human-shaped machines that transform alcohol into bugs."
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    Originally Posted by El Heggunte View Post
    Those .OGG files are b0rked (broken), granted.
    They're not broken as far as the source I acquired them from is concerned. They are just weirdly uncooperative. The source application plays them without issue, the same as the other OGG files which are not giving me complications.

    Originally Posted by El Heggunte View Post
    Have you already tried to decompress them to .WAVs with ffmpeg? Or with mpv
    Looks like we can add ffmpeg to the list of apps which fail to handle these files properly. ("Output file #0 does not contain any stream") Again, MediaInfo does recognize these files properly, including the stream which ffmpeg here is not seeing.

    Originally Posted by El Heggunte View Post
    If foobar2000 plays them correctly, then probably it can also convert to .WAVs correctly
    Thank you for this suggestion. I hadn't even known that Foobar2000 included this option. So I gave it a spin. Amazingly, yes, it was indeed able to output the file as WAV. It also gave this error:

    Code:
    1 out of 1 tracks converted with minor problems.
    
    Source: "a_file.ogg"
      Nonsense Ogg granulepos value, file is not properly seekable
    Fair enough—I already noted in the OP that even though Foobar2000 could play the trouble OGGs, it couldn't seek them. The error didn't seem to impact the app's ability to output the WAV, though.

    Anyway, looks like this is a usable solution, and can be utilized in a bulk capacity so I don't have to do a thousand files one by one by hand.
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    Anyway, looks like this is a usable solution, and can be utilized in a bulk capacity so I don't have to do a thousand files one by one by hand.
    You're welcome

    Originally Posted by Asterra View Post
    Originally Posted by El Heggunte View Post
    Those .OGG files are b0rked (broken), granted.
    They're not broken as far as the source I acquired them from is concerned. They are just weirdly uncooperative. The source application plays them without issue, the same as the other OGG files which are not giving me complications.
    What's the name of the "source application"?
    Anyway: in my book of rules, if a media file gets warnings from FFmpeg, foobar2000 AND "etc" at the same time, then you can be pretty sure that it is broken
    (i.e., it was not properly indexed, OR it was muxed with "swapped streams" (video in the place of audio and vice-versa), etc).
    Some applications were designed to ignore certain errors at times. As you yourself said, MediaInfo didn't detect anything wrong in those broken files,
    even though they were improperly generated
    VLC is another application which is famous for being able to play (almost) "anything" that is thrown at it.
    I still have some very-rare MP3s from the KaZaA era which confused LAV Filters but were played fine by MPlayer... and so on.

    So if I were you, I would convert those problematic .OGGs to FLAC, assuming that their contents should not be discarded, of course.
    "Programmers are human-shaped machines that transform alcohol into bugs."
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    Originally Posted by El Heggunte View Post
    Anyway: in my book of rules, if a media file gets warnings from FFmpeg, foobar2000 AND "etc" at the same time, then you can be pretty sure that it is broken
    I suppose it would be more fair to note that there really ought to be some flexibility on the part of apps that are intended to edit/convert files. At least as much flexibility as can be found in media players. The solution that was ultimately arrived at really says it all: I have to use a music player as part of my workflow. It's kind of pitiful. Also: Using this episode as a case-in-point, files are not always going to be 100.0% compliant with whatever an editor/converter is looking for. Them's the breaks. Those who make media players seem to understand this rather better.
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