In Reply to: Some inconvenient facts posted by Tony Lauck on January 5, 2012 at 20:09:15:
I did not read the article either and I'm certain that front end programs are capable of altering header information of files being encoded/decoded. That said, the command-line FLAC encoder/decoder will not alter the md5sum of a file with a round trip of compression/decompression.
$ md5sum "(01)Donna.wav"
1edd5e7e92dbbca6413b1bfa2107fea8 *(01)Donna.wav
$ flac "(01)Donna.wav"
flac 1.2.1, Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007 Josh Coalson
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for details.
(01)Donna.wav: wrote 18105303 bytes, ratio=0.588
$ flac -f -d "(01)Donna.flac"
flac 1.2.1, Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007 Josh Coalson
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type `flac' for details.
(01)Donna.flac: done
$ md5sum "(01)Donna.wav"
1edd5e7e92dbbca6413b1bfa2107fea8 *(01)Donna.wav
As you noted, some of the advanced command-line options are capable of changing the encoding and headers, but I have not fully experimented with their effect.
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Follow Ups
- fact remains that flac encoding in of itself doesn't alter a file signature. - MikeCh 21:17:21 01/05/12 (0)