pacpl can't handle double-quote characters in title tags

Audio source for those two .flac files is the sound sample from http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=983. The only difference between the two files is the title tag; everything else should be identical.

To reproduce the bug:

1) Download both nightengale*.flac files into the same directory.
2) Run "pacpl -v -t m4a nightengale*.flac"

For extra debugging output:

sudo $EDITOR /usr/bin/pacpl
Search for the regex "pnotice.*encode_string"
Delete the words "if $dryrun" from the end of the line, so that the debug message will print even in non-dryrun mode. (In dryrun mode, the title tag isn't actually extracted, so the debug information printed in dryrun mode is not the actual command that gets edited in non-dryrun mode).
Run the pacpl command above, and note the combination of spaces and quotes in the call to the faac encoder.

I believe the solution to this bug would be to check the title tag for double-quote characters (and possibly other "special" shell characters like dollar signs, etc.) and backslash-escape them before passing them to the encoder.

Upstream doesn't have a bug tracker, but http://pacpl.sourceforge.net/faq.html lists an email address to contact to report bugs. I've reported this bug upstream by emailing them the URL of this Launchpad report.

Hello, I think maybe I'm suffering the same bug.

I'm facing the issue also going flac -> aac

> I'm having trouble encoding aac's from my flac files. I believe there is a bug.

I've tried the following:

$ pacpl --to aac -r -o flac --outdir /tmp /home/discord/Music/flac/

Converting: [01 - Air - Do The Joy.flac] -> [aac] encode failed with exit status: 256

> Also note that the aacqual option does not seem to work:

$ pacpl --to aac --aacqual 196 -r -V -o flac --outdir /tmp --dryrun /home/discord/Music/flac/

debug: ffmpeg -y -i "/tmp/Björk-Debut-12-Play_Dead.9261.wav" -ab 128.k -ar 44100 -ac 2 "/tmp/Björk-Debut-12-Play_Dead.aac"

removed temporary file: /tmp/Björk-Debut-12-Play_Dead.9261.wav

Converting: [07 Moon 83.flac] -> [aac]

debug: flac -f -d "/home/discord/Music/flac/B52's/07 Moon 83.flac" -o "/tmp/07 Moon 83.24947.wav"

debug: ffmpeg -y -i "/tmp/07 Moon 83.24947.wav" -ab 128.k -ar 44100 -ac 2 "/tmp/07 Moon 83.aac"

removed temporary file: /tmp/07 Moon 83.24947.wav

$ pacpl --to aac --aacqual 450 -r -V -o flac --outdir /tmp --dryrun /home/discord/Music/flac/

>I don't know why the manual for pacpl states the default value is 300 when it seems to be 128K. As you probably already know, the -ab option in ffmpeg specifies the bitrate.

>I found and tried a fix mentioned on the ubuntu forums, but it didn't work for me:

>Here is a fix for the "encode failed with exit status: 256" error message.
>
>I was getting the "encode failed with exit status: 256" error message when trying to convert flac to m4a to use on my >ipod. The problem was that pacpl is passing the wrong command line options to ffmpeg, as the --verbose option >reveals (see output below). The fix is to edit line 2036 of /usr/bin/pacpl to read
>
>case /mp4|m4a|m4b/ { return "-title \"$tag_name{title}\" -track \"$tag_name{track}\" -author \"$tag_name{artist}\" ->album \"$tag_name{album}\" \"$tag_name{comment}\" -year \"$tag_name{year}\""; }
>
>(all one line). ffmpeg is expecting single dashes for options, "author" instead of "artist", and has no genre field. I've >filed a bug report.

I'd like to offer some help on this.

Basically, there are two things going on:
1) ffmpeg is getting the wrong options from pacpl for handling of metadata.
2) faac is having another issue, possible related to the special characters previously mentioned.

I'd be happy to look into fixing both (I'm already well along on the ffmpeg issue). I'm going to try to apply fixes to pacpl, and will be talking to the author of that package (upstream) as well as the Ubuntu team to get a fix tested and into an update for their repositories.

I know it's been a while for you (7 months?) but please give me a few weeks and I'm hopeful I'll get this fixed.

Time sure flies by.

As for #1 (wrong ffmpeg options) the corrections would be:
-metadata title=
instead of
-title
etc.
So the whole line (2064 in /usr/bin/pacpl in 4.0.5) would look like:

return "-metadata title=\"$tag_name{title}\" -metadata track=\"$tag_name{track}\" -metadata author=\"$tag_name{artist}\" -metadata album=\"$tag_name{album}\" -metadata comment=\"$tag_name{comment}\" -metadata year=\"$tag_name{year}\" -metadata genre=\"$tag_name{genre}\"";

That at least gets us through the 256 error, but the output files are still left with empty tags.

Forwarded to https://sourceforge.net/p/pacpl/bugs/22/