[Flac-dev] Should FLAC join Xiph?

[Steve Lhomme]

Joshua Haberman wrote:
> The most interesting questions to me are ones you didn't address:
> 
> 1. Will Ogg FLAC become the default manifestation of the FLAC codec?
> If not, why not?  What does Ogg not offer that makes it worth having
> two different file formats of the same codec floating around?

Related to 2...

> 2. Will FLAC be incorporated into the Ogg project to such an extent
> that there could be one set of libraries and one set of commandline
> tools for both FLAC and Vorbis?  This would be so incredibly useful.

This might be also a problem.
Are FLAC and Vorbis similar codec ? No.
Do they need the same codec API ? Yes.
Can they be used in OGG ? Yes.
Can they be used in other containers (MCF?) ? They should
Do the current Xiph API allow to put Vorbis in other containers ? I 
don't know.
Do you want the FLAC API to be tied to the OGG container ? I don't think so.

> As an application author (Audacity), having to write, test, and debug
> an extra set of import/export routines is a significant pain, and
> it would be so great to have to write only one set that would support
> both Vorbis and FLAC.  As a user who has encoded a significant amount
> of music into the FLAC format, I feel like a second-class user since
> many applications now support Vorbis but very few support FLAC.

This is interresting. The UCI project is exactly for you. http://uci.sf.net/
It is still in early stage but with some more support (we already try to 
help Alex as much as we can) it could solve your problem and also for 
many other people ! The same codec API on all OS.

I hope Xiph will consider that initiative too !

> If encoding/decoding/metadata operations could be accessed from a
> single API, this would be a great boon to seeing FLAC supported in
> many more applications.  BTW, why is metadata implemented as part
> of each codec and not as part of Ogg?