Media Center Home

J.River Media Center Plugins

In_FLAC

In_FLAC is the flac decoder plugin for J.River Media Center. The decoder plugin is the one that allows Media Center to play and tag flac files. The decoder plugin uses the open-source flac library (libFLAC++) to do the dirty work.

Status

As of 25-September-2007, J.River has taken over development of the flac plugins. This site is maintained for reference only.

Acknowledgements

I have to give a shout out to Oblong, who put together the first FLAC decoder plugin for MC. Unfortunately, he hasn't really been able to update the plugin, so I came along and did the encoder, and now have updated (well, rewritten) the decoder as well (with his understanding).

For bug reports and testing: everyone. You know who you are.

And of course to JRiver who put out MediaCenter.

Caveats on the current version

It works for me. May not work for you. No warranty is implied. See the GNU public license.

Image Files in Tags

As of Flac 1.1.3, image file handling is supported through the Picture Block. The Picture Block is part of the Metadata but is not part of the Vorbis tags. In_Flac v2.1.0+ will import and export cover art from the Picture Block.

Tags Storage and Updating

J.River has deprecated the "YEAR" tag in favor of "DATE" so I now ignore the YEAR requests.

CueSheets

CueSheets are not very well implemented in MC yet. MC will play them OK, and that works with the decoder plugin. I even got the cuesheet block and the cue sheet stored as clear text in the comment block, but MC won't even go to the plugin when you try to update library from files, that's why it gives an error. In this case, it's them, not me, at least as near as I can tell. I have it set up so that tags that would be unique to each track are stored as tag[track] (e.g. Name[2]=Belfast Child). But I don't update the cuesheet itself. If you make changes to it, the plugin will incorporate them. NOTE: only works on cue sheets whose name is the same as the *.flac (except, of course, *.cue). And multiple FILEs per CUE are not supported, all must be in the same file.

Settings

There are Decoding options and Tagging options.

Decoding Options

You can enable the "decode through errors" checkbox which should allow the decoder to continue on through any frame sync errors, etc. You should just get a silent gap at that point (usually about 0.10 second).

Tagging Options

You can enable the "Remove All Image Blocks with Tags" checkbox which will remove all flac PictureBlocks from the metadata when you select a "Remove All Tags" from within MC. If unset, no image blocks will be removed from the metadata during the "Remove All Tags". Sending a blank filename to the plugin for the Cover Art (such as "Update Tags from Library") will remove any cover art picture block.

The other tagging option is "Remove Empty Tags" checkbox (default is enabled), which will remove empty tags when updated.