Fixing SBEs with shntool

[Jskibum]

Until I get the hard disc player for my car, I'll keep burning away. Glad you don't have your way!

[RainDawg]

Yes, you could certainly make a batch file with -pad after -fix. If the -fix is used, it will automatically pad the final track by defualt (unless you disable it) and thus the pad won't do anything. If only the last track has an SBE, then fix won't do anything which will leave pad to fix it. As long as you write the batch file with the switches setup correctly, there's no reason this won't reliably fix any set, regardless of where and how many SBEs are present.

[RainDawg]

Originally Posted by Jskibum

Until I get the hard disc player for my car, I'll keep burning away. Glad you don't have your way!

LOL...I'm being somewhat tongue in cheek here. My response was really meant to insinuate that it's not a forgone conclusion that someone is going to be burning things to a CD at all.

In a perfect world though..... .

In re-reading these posts I note that bobs did mention way back that he uses CDwave to cut his tracks, so I'm a tad puzzled as to why he brought up the issue of cutting tracks with soundforge.

As for Ninja, I think he's misunderstood the issue. As I read it, bobs wants to cut up the wave file for compression and seeding purposes, not merely to burn an audio CD. If all bobs wanted to do was burn an audio CD then I would agree that cutting wave file first into separate tracks is totally unnecessary. But, again, I don't think that's what he's talking about.

What I think it comes down to is bobs needs a little help using shntool. RainDawg and I are agreed that shntool in fix mode will fix all SBEs in a set of audio files, even if the SBE is only on the very last track. You don't need to use the -pad argument with fix mode as fix mode pads by default.

[bobs23]

The SF comment was only to state that you shouldn't use it for tracking. When I get home from work I'll post my batch file. More than likely it's a bit off. I'm actaully a bit shocked I got it to work in the first place. In looking at the tutorials I can see it's a very powerful program with many uses, with me in the middle of TV season I get very little time to play. It has been a looong time since I have done anything remotely related to DOS.

[bobs23]

Here is my fix batch file:
@echo off
%~d1 & cd %*
for %%T in (shn flac wav ape) do if exist *.%%T shntool fix *.%%T
pause

What should I add to pad the last file?

bobs, I don't see anything wrong with this code. In fact, it looks eerily familiar to me as some code I once wrote and posted at STG for use with len mode.

As I posted above, shntool in fix mode pads the last track by default so you don't need to put anything in there to get it to pad.

I think we need some more information. Could you tell us what shntool actually says when it fixes a set that has an sbe on the last track?

As an aside, I would suggest the following:
- Put quotes around every *.%%T just in case your interpreter has trouble with spaces in filenames (which is a no no for audio trading anyway, but it happens).
- Using a batchfile for fix mode is risky because you might not always want the entire set of files treated as one set if the music is actually say 2 sets. Do keep that in mind.
- This batchfile will always output into wave format. I'm not sure that's what you really want when fixing shn, flac or ape. As I said I have a sneaking suspicion that I am the original author of this code, but I wrote it only for len mode, and someone has adapted it to fix mode, for which it was not really intended.

[irishcrazy2005]

Okay, so I've now fixed all of my shows which had SBEs. I made a note in the text file that says "Fixed Sector Boundary Errors with shntool 2.0.3," and I made new fingerprint files for each of these. Is there anything else that I need to do before trading these?

-Phil

[RainDawg]

Originally Posted by bobs23

Here is my fix batch file:
@echo off
%~d1 & cd %*
for %%T in (shn flac wav ape) do if exist *.%%T shntool fix *.%%T
pause

What should I add to pad the last file?

Yes, just reading through the shntool documentation (I'm sure you'll all done this, right ) reveals that the fix command contains a special switch called -noskip. I've not tried it yet, but this should pad the final track with silence regardless of whether or not there are other SBEs in the set.

So, the code would look like this:

@echo off
%~d1 & cd %*
for %%T in (shn flac wav ape) do if exist *.%%T shntool fix -noskip *.%%T
pause

I've not given it a whirl yet, please let me know how it works on sets with multiple SBEs and on sets with only a SBE on the final track.

[bobs23]

OK here's something whacky. I pasted the above cmd. to a new batch file and it crashed all my other batches. I deleated this one and everything esle started working again Now on a sidebar. I tried to do a print screen. I did it 2 ways. first I just hit print scren, then alt. print screen. I opened photoshop and thought I should just paste into a new window, but it was a no go. Is there something I'm missing? I was trying to show my batch file results.

Originally Posted by RainDawg

Yes, just reading through the shntool documentation (I'm sure you'll all done this, right ) reveals that the fix command contains a special switch called -noskip. I've not tried it yet, but this should pad the final track with silence regardless of whether or not there are other SBEs in the set.

So, the code would look like this:

@echo off
%~d1 & cd %*
for %%T in (shn flac wav ape) do if exist *.%%T shntool fix -noskip *.%%T
pause

I've not given it a whirl yet, please let me know how it works on sets with multiple SBEs and on sets with only a SBE on the final track.

I refreshed my memory on this, and the real purpose of the -noskip switch is for when your output format is different from your input format. Since by default shntool only fixes files that actually need it, if you run shntool on say wave files and want flac output you should use the -noskip argument otherwise only the files that are actually fixed will end up as flac, and you will then have to convert the remaining files to flac using another process. This is a waste of time, so -noskip tells shntool to convert every file, not just the ones that need fixing.

What this means is you do not need to use the -noskip argument just because only the last track has an SBE. As I've said before, provided you give shntool at least two files to work on (including the flawed last track) in fix mode, it will fix the sbe on the last track.