[Flac-dev] flac in the filesystem?

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 12:16:04PM -0800, Joshua Haberman wrote:

> I disagree that adding flac support to all programs is "the right
> thing to do," simply because it's not necessary or realistic. In my
> scenerio, people will be accessing the music using many different
> programs and OSs, and there's no reason why each one should be
> required to learn about a different format when it's conceptually
> identical to reading a straight wav file. As someone who's doing
> development on an application involving digital audio, I can tell you
> that it's a pain spending time supporting umpteen different formats
> when each of them has a command-line encoder that understands wav just
> fine (but alas, that's what users want...).

I agree with Josh (the other one) that abstraction libraries like
libaudiofile are a good way to make this a zero-maintenance feature.
Theoretically, support for new formats can be added to the library, and
all programs using that library will become instantly able to handle it.

So while the program could continue to deal with raw audio data,
decoding of various formats would happen transparently through the
library.  This is a complete userspace solution that doesn't require any
fancy preloading tricks (following the KISS principle).

On a related note, it might be nice for the flac command-line encoder
itself to link with libaudiofile, to enable it to read various audio
formats for encoding.  It could in effect become an anything->FLAC
converter.

-- 
 - mdz