HDCD ripping properly to 24bit FLAC

Came across a Joni Mitchell title today at the thrift so I tested it. Peak Extension-Enabled (tested with foobar)
No issues with dBPower (latest, after like five years I finally updated it ), wait till it's completely ripped, the _File will catch up. I've got all the latest updates on Win10.

 

That's strange.

I wonder if there's another application that's interfering with the HDCD.exe command.

 

It is strange. HDCD decoding in CUETools and dBpoweramp is working for me with Windows 10 version 1803. I haven't tried Foobar HDCD decoding yet with 1803. I don't have Foobar configured to do HDCD decoding and generally don't use Foobar much.

It's possible that something in your system is interfering with the HDCD code working properly. Maybe AV or some other security software. Another possibility is user account permissions. Have you recently changed your account from standard user to administrator, or administrator to standard user? Sometimes changing your account type can cause some software to not run correctly. The fix is usually to reinstall that software again with your current user account permissions.

 

I tried reinstalling Foobar2000 and dBPoweramp and still get the same results. When I open up the HDCD.exe code in the command prompt it is blank. Is this normal?

I'm running Windows 10 Pro version 10.0.17134.

 

Can you use HDCD.exe standalone from the commandtool?

 

I can pull up the HDCD.exe with the command tool but don't know where to go from there. It's totally blank when I open the command tool.

 

Well you need to add parameters for infile and outfile to the HDCD command to convert a file. I don't have the parameters here right now but you will find it if you Google it.

 

Okay, I was able to successfully decode a track to a 24-bit file using the HDCD.exe command in the command prompt so I've confirmed that it works there. However, still no success when trying the same thing using dBPoweramp.

 

Still no luck decoding HDCD using Foobar2000 or dBPoweramp. I'm at a total loss as to what to do now.

 

Well, I activated my Admin account and logged in. Everything worked fine. Is there a way to set permissions on my regular account or do I need to use my Admin account from now on?

 

Why isn't your "regular" account an admin account?

 

is this due to the fact that it was never really a supported format? I have about 5 hdcds that I can't get to rip properly (another story)....

 

It was but somehow my regular account got messed up. I went ahead and created a new admin account and moved all of the old user docs over. Everything works great now.

 

So it was a permissions issue. That makes sense in hindsight. But can be a difficult problem to diagnose because you won't see an error as to why some programs fail to run correctly.

One way to try to fix problems like that is to reinstall the affected software. Log in to the affected account and run the installer for the affected software and have it install over the existing install. The installer will (should) set permissions correctly during the reinstall process. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't.

If that doesn't work then there may be something messed up in the permissions for account itself. Easiest and most reliable way to fix that is to create a new account. Transfer data and files over to the new account. And delete the account that is having permissions problems.

Best practices for Windows (and any OS) is to create an administrator account for admin work. And a separate user account with regular user permissions for your day-to-day regular work. You should end up spending 99% of your time in your user account and rarely need to log in to the administrator account. The reason is to protect you from yourself from accidentally deleting or breaking system files and system settings. Also to keep malware or misbehaving programs from being able to affect the system level and other accounts. If you have kids you don't want them to have admin access. Give each kid their own account with regular user privileges.

When running as a regular user account you can still run programs and give them administrator access. For example, if you need to run a command prompt with administrator privileges you can do that by right-clicking on a shortcut for the command prompt and selecting "run as administrator". Windows will pop up a dialog asking for the administrator account and password then open the command prompt after you type in the admin password. This article explains: How to run programs as administrator in Windows 10

 

This is exactly what I did and everything seems to be resolved. We have three kids so my guess is that one of them broke something at one point and I was never able to figure out what it was. Now I have the admin account, a password-protected regular account for the wife and me, and a regular account for the kids. Hopefully, I can avoid any issues in the future.

 

Sharing your PC with your kids is pretty brave. Antivirus programs help a lot, but they can't keep a machine from getting infected with malware when kids are actively venturing to places on the internet where they shouldn't go...