| Tech Note | There were torrent comments indicating that some folks believed the
phase of the left channel was inverted. I've made this kind of repair
on torrents before, listened to the original, came to the conclusion
it had the same type of problem, and made the same type of repair to
this one.
There are sound men who believe that inverting the phase of one
channel will increase the perception of stereo separation. There are
also sound men that will knowingly invert one channel when taping as
an anti-bootlegging strategy. It's also quite common to run into ALD
recordings and mono recordings with one channel inverted.
I have no proof that the left channel was inverted on the original
material, it is just a hunch. Listen, compare, and see for yourself.
I tested the original FLAC files with "flac -t", visually verified the
original FFP against "shntool md5", converted them to WAV with "flac
-d", then wrote a short script to run "sox" on each track, inverting
the phase of the left channel. The sox command line for each file
looked like:
sox -V $infile $outfile avg -1,0,0,1
I created WAV md5 checksums for the new wav files with "md5sum
--binary *.wav" and created new FLAC files with "flac -e --verify
--best *.wav". I used "metaflac --show-md5sum" to create a new FFP
file. I did a test decode of the FLAC files and verified that the WAV
files from the new FLAC files matched the WAV md5 checksums.
I was feeling sassy and so I used easytag to set some basic FLAC tags
from the contents of the info file and then used "metaflac
--add-replay-gain" to add ReplayGain tags as well.
All work was done on White Box Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL3 clone).
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