Cannot read 6ch FLAC file

sf.read(r'D:\temp\6ch_silence.flac')
Out[6]: (array([], shape=(0, 6), dtype=float64), 16000)

sf.read(r'D:\temp\2ch_silence.flac')
Out[7]: 
(array([[0., 0.],
        [0., 0.],
        [0., 0.],
        ...,
        [0., 0.],
        [0., 0.],
        [0., 0.]]),
 16000)

multi_ch_flac.zip

When I try to read 6ch flac file, soundfile returns empty array. 2ch is fine.

[bastibe]

So, I investigated this a bit:

It seems that there is a limit on how many samples can be read from flac files at the moment. With your 2ch-example, the entire file is smaller than the limit, but with the 6ch-example is bigger. Reading in chunks of up to 2:45 minutes (or thereabouts) seems to work. More than that does not work.

This is most probably related to https://github.com/libsndfile/libsndfile/pull/858, and will therefore hopefully be fixed in the next release of libsndfile.

If you don’t think this is related, please open an issue at libsndfile. Silent files can be weird edge cases sometimes.

[bastibe]

(By the way, if you urgently need a fix, put an updated libsndfile in your load path, and soundfile will use it instead of its own)