[Flac-dev] Sound Font FLAC

[Josh Green]

Josh Coalson wrote:
> 
> Good points.  I imagine there should be two separate packages;
> one for the command line tools, and one like flac-devel, which
> has the libs and the includes.  BTW in this scenario the files
> that are currently in include/FLAC would go in /usr/include/FLAC
> and you would do something like #include "FLAC/stream_encoder.h".
> Not sure how to accomplish this with libtool/automake yet since
> I'm still kind of weak in this area.
> 

Yes, a flac and flac-devel package would work well. I created the
libsndfile RPM packages using audiofile's build system as an example. I
might be able to do something like this for FLAC. This should probably
be cleared up before 1.0?

I managed to create an encoder for the audio chunk of a sound font (have
yet to do any meta data block for gzip compressed non-audio data, there
will probably be 2 METADATA blocks to simplify things, one for before
and one for after the audio chunk). All seems to function alright. I do
have a few comments on the design of the libFLAC API. The
FLAC__stream_encoder_init() function call has quite a lot of parameters.
Do you forsee a reason to add or modify any of these in the future? I
would think that creating an init structure to pass to this function
would make sense. Or even better would be to have some functions for
setting parameters in the FLAC encoder instance (I notice you already
have functions for getting parameters). The FLAC encoder instance could
then have default values, and there would be certain parameters that
would be required to set. Not setting an optional parameter would just
cause the default to be used. What do you think? It seems like the
current implimentation will be a nightmare to try to keep a backwards
compatible libFLAC API.

Regarding the sound font compressor I'm creating. I am thinking of
naming it simply "Sound Font FLAC" (Sound Font Free Lossless Audio
Codec) with a file extension of .sfflac (any other suggestions?). Or do
you think I should just keep the .flac extension? Someone mistaking the
file for a regular FLAC file would get a single sample (which is
actually multiple back to back 16 bit samples) which seems alright.

Lates..
	Josh Green