[Flac-dev] What's left for 1.0?

[Josh Coalson]

--- Matt Zimmerman <mdz at debian.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 02:42:51PM -0800, Josh Coalson wrote:
> 
> > > maybe tagging. i think that id3 tag isn't enough 'cause it
> supports only 30
> > > character strings and don't fulfil a requirement of
> internationalization i
> > > mentioned before.
> > > 
> > The decoder properly ignores id3v2 tags.  Unless you mean that the
> plugins
> > should read id3v2... that I can look into.
> 
> This should be pretty easy to do with libid3, but is ID3 really the
> right
> choice for FLAC?  Since FLAC is intended to support streaming, and
> ID3v2 lives
> at the beginning of a file, users listening in partway to a stream
> will not
> have access to the information.  Also, since ID3v2 can contain huge
> amounts of
> data (e.g. lyrics and images), it would probably be inappropriate to
> repeat it
> within a stream, lest it skew the bitrate of the overall stream vs.
> the audio
> bitrate.
> 
> As far as I know, Vorbis has the same situation, with space for tags
> only at
> the beginning of the stream.  I think it would be nice for a
> streaming format
> to support periodic repetition of very short, textual tags like those
> used in
> Vorbis, so that the information will be avaiable regardless of at
> what point a
> user "tunes in".  ID3v2 could still be used for larger, one-time data
> at the
> beginning of a stream; perhaps the periodic tags could even be a
> subset of
> ID3v2.
> 
> Is this a problem that interests you?
> 
It is definitely a good idea to have a mechanism while
streaming that periocally sends some metadata.  The FLAC
format does not go 'all the way up' to where the Ogg
bitstream format does I guess.  I didn't really want to
specify a system-level stream.  This kind of thing should
actually go in the system-level (maybe the Ogg layer)
with FLAC encapsulated by Ogg.

An analogous situation is that of MPEG-1 (and I'm guessing
MPEG-2) where audio/video streams have their own formatting
and synchronizations, and they can be multiplexed onto a
system stream.

Josh

P.S. By the way, I would post some of this to the vorbis list
too but I am blocked there by the spam filter.


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