How do I remove padding after deleting metadata?
Reply #16 – 2014-08-26 23:11:49
There's one downside to using metaflac with the above method. The used command line options remove ALL padding from the FLAC files. This isn't necessarily an issue, but padding serves a purpose. If metadata gets added or changed on a file without any padding, even if it's just fixing a small typo in a title, the whole file needs to be re-written on the HDD. Depending on the amount of files you're editing, the file sizes (think about high resolution multi-channel stuff) and speed of your drive, this may take longer than you'd expect. So it's definitely desirable to have a small amount of padding in all files, because then such small metadata changes are practically instant, because that new information just gets written over a part of the padding (that's probably a cringe-worthy explanation from a technical point of view, but that's how I imagine it to work). That's why the default setting in the FLAC encoder adds a small amount of padding to all files (it's 4 or 8 KiB, if I'm not mistaken). The problem with metaflac is, that you need to run it twice to achieve this. First to remove the picture and all padding, then a second time to add a healthy amount of padding again. It's not possible to do this in one run. I haven't done much with foo_run yet, but I believe it should be possible to chain two commands in one command? So taking the example from MrMonkey's post, adding 8 KB of padding after removing it completely, would look something like this:E:\metaflac.exe --remove --block-type=PADDING --dont-use-padding "%path%" E:\metaflac.exe --add-padding=8192 "%path%" I was thinking about creating a new thread, but then I found this one. I'm not sure, if this is the place to ask for feature requests for foobar, though. It would be great, if foobar allowed adjustment of advances settings regarding padding in FLAC files. I imagine it would be possible to add a setting to actually remove images from the FLAC files without replacing it with padding, and leaving a small default amount of padding in the files. Metaflac does its job well, but a native foobar solution would be so much more convenient. My assumption is, that the majority of people aren't even aware of this behaviour in foobar or also MP3Tag. They see that the image is "gone" after removing it via the tag editors, but don't realize that their FLAC files didn't get any smaller.