[Flac-dev] FLAC format

[Daniel Souza]

HI Josh,

I'm starting now to compile the ACM codec. I don't know how long it will
take, since I do it in my free time, but I guess it will not take to long.
About Mark Powell's comment, with an ACM codec there will be a lot of
Windows GUIs for FLAC.
I'm writing this message to talk about the FLAC format. The GUIs for the
Audio Codec Manager, including Winamp and Windows Media Player for decoding
and CodAxe for encoding, can use any format with a codec registered in the
system using the RIFF file format. In this ACM codec's implementation, all
data, including the "fLaC" marker and the metadata blocks, is placed by the
Audio Codec Manager encoder's GUI in the RIFF's data area. Actually, I
couldn't find any other way for doing this. The inconvenient is that the
files written this way can't be read by any other than the Audio Codec
Manager.
I have two suggestions to solve this problem: the reference decoder could be
modified to understand the RIFF structure or the FLAC format could be
changed to meet the RIFF format. The first solution's inconvenient is that
there will be some data repeated, which is not a good idea in a compression
format. I don't know if the amount of space waste is relevant here. The
second solution's inconvenient is that a format change will break the
compatibility with previous versions. It's not good either. What do you
think?
Another thing: it will be necessary to register the wave format, the
manufacturer id and the product id with Microsoft. It's a little hard for me
to do this here from Brazil. Are you in USA? You can keep the ACM codec's
copyright, I just want my name in the code files as the original developer.

Regards,
Daniel