[Flac-dev] flac123 revival

[Sander Roobol]

Hello Dan Johnson, hello list,

It's really weird that there's no working command line player for FLAC
files. Dan Johnson created flac123 (licensed under the GPL) to fill that
gap, and started the flac-tools project.

Unfortunately, flac123 doesn't work anymore with the latest FLAC, and
the flac-tools project has been idle for more than a year.

I created a patch that makes flac123 work again with the latest flac
(tested with 1.1.0), and improves the libao driver selection. It also
fixes a configure issue when searching for libFLAC (libFLAC depends on
libm on some systems). The patch is attached to this messsage.

But why is this relevant to the flac-dev list? Well, I think flac123
should be incorporated into the main FLAC distribution. Since FLAC
already distributes various plugins, it would IMO be a small step to
start distributing a command line player like flac123 too. FLAC provides
a standalone tool to encode and decode files, but none for playback.

I'm willing to maintain flac123, either in the FLAC project, or in
flac-tools, or even as a separate fork, although I really prefer the
first option. FLAC just needs a simple, working and widely available
command line player.

What do you think?

Sander