FLAC cue file seek incorrect without seek table

[trilepton]

I believe I've run into a bug that was reported previously (over 6 years ago) at https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 6&start=20.

For some FLAC files with cue sheets, selecting tracks does not jump to the position specified in the cue sheet. It jumps to an arbitrary point. In my case it jumps to about 5 seconds after the cue point for tracks 2 and 3 and 18 seconds after the cue point for track 4. The cue sheet was not problematic as I was able to use Flacon to split the individual tracks at the correct positions.

The prior report that I linked above mentioned that converting the file to WAV and back to FLAC resolves the problem. I was able to confirm that the cue sheet works correctly for both the converted WAV and subsequently re-encoded FLAC file.

Using metaflac, I compared the original FLAC file with the re-encoded one. It turns out the original file was missing a SEEKTABLE metadata block (I obtained the original file by exporting from Audacity so I assume the encoding options didn't include a seek table). I then removed the seek table from the re-encoded file and observed that the issue was back. I then added back the seek table block (every 10 seconds, the default option for flac encoder, metaflac --add-seekpoint=10s reencoded.flac) and the problem goes away.

It looks like VLC seek behavior for FLAC files with cue sheets depends on the seek table metadata block being present to work correctly. However, according to the FLAC documentation the seek table block is not required and VLC is expected to seek properly without it.

I'm using VLC version 2.2.2 Weatherwax on Linux Mint 18.1 64-bit.