Despite the fact that music streaming platforms are becoming more popular, many users prefer to have their music collection locally, since this way they can enjoy it anywhere without depending on an Internet connection. One of the best formats for storing music locally is FLAC , a lossless compression format with much higher quality than MP3 or AAC . However, Windows 10 is corrupting them.
This is what Microsoft itself is alerting, which states that a failure present in Windows 10 May 2020 Update (2004) and later, both in its Pro, Home, Enterprise and Workstation versions, corrupts FLAC files if you modify the metadata of the songs using File Explorer.
Windows 10 corrupts metadata in FLAC files
The flaw is that if the file contains an ID3 tag before the FLAC header , the file will be corrupted. The ID3 is responsible for storing information such as the title of the song, the artist, the album, the position within the album, etc. In Windows 10, the ID3 is ignored because the system uses the information from the FLAC file ignoring the ID3. However, when modifying it in Windows, we found that the ID3 is overwritten without the startup code, so players cannot identify the file by modifying it to read it.
Therefore, the players cannot open these files correctly if we modify any data such as the artist or the name of the song. Fortunately, Microsoft seems to have found the solution to the bug, and they have released an update via Windows Update to fix it.
There is a solution, but be careful when installing the patch
The update is the
. In your list of changes we can see how this bug is fixed. If you have had the bad luck that some files have been corrupted, the solution is fortunately quite simple. To do this, Microsoft has released a PowerShell script that fixes corrupted files so that they can be played again. Unfortunately, you cannot retrieve the metadata that was stored in the ID3 tags , so the metadata will have to be manually added to the files again.
Installing the update is optional, and you have to manually go to Windows Update to install it. However, there are some users who claim to be having problems with this update as well, where they claim that the icons on the taskbar and in the start menu are not visible if they have the News and Interests function activated, so it is necessary disable the function if we have problems. In the end, Windows 10 updates are a difficult balance between choosing which things we prefer to fail.