[Bug 109581] Re: normalize-mp3 0.7.7 fails at line 741 (0.7.6 worked)

[Adam Buchbinder]

There's been no change in the package between Gutsy and Jaunty. I'm
disappointed in the tendency to stop by a bug which (a) is trivial to
reproduce, (b) is in a package which hasn't changed in a full year, (c)
crashes in the normal use case, requiring manual cleanup (the source
file is deleted by the time of the crash), along with actual data
lossage (say goodbye to your tags), and (d) contains a patch which
clearly hasn't been applied... and mark it as 'Incomplete' so that if
the original reporter isn't paying attention to it after a year and a
half, it can be shuffled under the rug and forgotten. *Especially* when
it's so trivial to reproduce.

$ dpkg -l |grep normalize-audio |awk '{ print $3 }'
0.7.7-2
$ normalize-mp3 test.mp3 
Decoding test.mp3...
Running normalize...
Re-encoding test.mp3...
Can't exec "": No such file or directory at /usr/bin/normalize-mp3 line 797.
Error encoding, stopped at /usr/bin/normalize-mp3 line 802.

There are several problems with the package: it recommends vorbis-tools
and flac, but no MP3 encoder. The "defaults" (see the
find_{mp3,ogg,flac}{en,de}code() functions in the script) are never
actually used, because the packager didn't comment out the "for local
setup" variables at the top of the script for some inscrutable reason.
Apart from all of this, it identifies files by their extensions rather
than using 'file' or some interface into libmagic to do so.

The quickest and simplest way to fix this particular mess is to simply
comment out the declarations of $MP3ENCODE and $MP3DECODE at the top of
the script; it'll default to a the more robust method of finding an
available encoder. It'll still fail if (lame|notlame|bladeenc) isn't
installed, so an MP3 encoder should be added to the Recommends field as
well. (It only Suggests an MP3 decoder.)

In any case, the command is misnamed; 'normalize-audio' is happy to
normalize MP3s, though it does it by setting a tag rather than
destructively decoding and reencoding the file. Seeing the commands
available in package 'normalize-audio', the user might be forgiven for
thinking that 'normalize-mp3' is the one that works on MP3s, and end up
putting their music through generation loss at the very least.
"normalize-audio-destructive" might be a better name, as decoding and
reencoding lossy compression is a destructive process. (On the other
hand, it works with FLAC files, and that's nondestructive.) I'm not sure
precisely how to fix it, but it's misleading at best as it stands now.

** Changed in: normalize-audio (Ubuntu)
       Status: Invalid => Confirmed

-- 
normalize-mp3 0.7.7 fails at line 741 (0.7.6 worked)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/109581
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