FLAC files stop playing when scrubbing through...

Does anyone else experience this?

I've had it happen across a wide variety of FLACs, and it seems to be happening more and more. If I beatjump, scrub, or otherwise skip ahead during playback of any FLAC files in a Traktor deck, the waveform will frequently go blurry and audio playback will stop soon after. Plays fine if I just let it play without doing anything. It is really frustrating and has almost tanked me at a few gigs now. I've been converting my FLAC down to 320 mp3 just to make sure. I haven't heard of anyone else experiencing this though, after doing a few searches. Any ideas?

I'm using:

Traktor 2.5.1
Kontrol S2
Early 2011 Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard

 

I've only experienced similar behavior with corrupt FLAC files.

I use a program called AudioTester (http://www.vuplayer.com/other.php) to scan my FLAC files before I import them to Traktor. I've found that some media players and tagging programs can corrupt FLAC files when editing tags, especially when artwork is included.

 

My collection has been predominantly in FLAC format for years and I've never experienced anything like this.

I think FLAC corruption is a possibility. The cause of such corruption would typically be (i) bad memory (run memtest or memtest86), (ii) bad storage (such as a faulty hard drive or other faulty media such as DVDs or USB sticks on which the FLACs were stored previously), or (iii) faulty tags.

Now, a few comments in case you are dealing with (iii). Some players will ignore corrupt or faulty tags, while on others playback may fail. But it's easy to check if merely the tags are the problem.

Just download the official FLAC command-line utilities from here and decode some of the files in question. You do that by issuing "flac -d filename.flac" which generates a decoded file named filename.wav.

If the decoding command doesn't throw an error, chances are merely the tag is damaged. You could check this by importing filename.wav into Traktor and seeing if it works without issues even when scrubbing through the audio.

EDIT: if the decoder throws an error, the audio stream in your FLAC is damaged. One of the advantages of FLAC compared to some other formats such as WAV is that it uses CRC checksums to identify bad frames. Additionally, it stores an MD5 hash of the entire raw PCM audio. So if the audio is damaged, the decoder will find out. In that case, (i) or (ii) are the most likely the root cause.