[Flac-dev] FREEFORM metadata (was: Compressing sound fonts with FLAC)

[Josh Coalson]

--- Josh Green <jgreen at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> I didn't quite get the answer to my question
> concerning whether the
> design of the FLAC standard should directly support
> inserting arbitrary
> data blocks which would be re-assembled with
> standard audio blocks on
> extract, or should FLAC leave this up to other
> programs?
> Adding zlib (bzlib too) support to FLAC and allowing
> for traditionally
> compressed blocks to be re-assembled when the file
> is extracted, would
> allow direct support of probably a lot of file
> formats that contain
> audio, but also contain other fluff.

I've been thinking about this.  Since FLAC supports
streaming as well as archival, adding support for
arbitrary non-audio blocks is kind of at odds with
its purpose and would make hardware decoders more
difficult to implement, especially with seeking.

I think it's best to limit this kind of data to
the metadata blocks.

Josh


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