[Flac-dev] Apple's Core Audio File container format

[Josh Coalson]

--- oliver oli <smoerk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Avuton Olrich wrote:
> > On 7/11/05, Erik de Castro Lopo <erikd-flac at mega-nerd.com> wrote:
> > 
> >>and I'm thinking of adding support for FLAC in a CAF container
> >>as well. Is anyone else working on this? If so please let me
> >>know so we can agree on how FLAC should be contained with CAF.
> > 
> > 
> > I'm sorry, but what are the advantages to the different containers,
> or
> > this container in particular? I mean this is nothing different than
> > flac/OggFlac, which are little to none from what I've read (around
> > hydrogenaudio), am I wrong?
> 
> the first thing that comes to mind is the channel layout capabilities
> of
> CAF, it's more advanced than Ogg or Flac.
> 
>
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MusicAudio/Reference/CAFSpec/CAF_spec/chapter_3_section_5.html

good god!  those will never all fit into a native FLAC frame
header of course.  the intent for FLAC was that channels should
only be grouped insofar as there is correlation between them that
can be exploited by the encoder, and the channel assignment is for
describing that.  uncorrelated channels would then be in separate
FLAC streams muxed together in a real container.

> my question is: if you put Flac in a CAF container, it's not playable
> with any FLAC compatible player. FLAC is also a lossless format,
> which
> means you can recode it. this would be a good time to fix design
> "errors" (if there are any) in Flac for CAF/Flac.

there are, but native FLAC is so prevalent now, it's harder
than it sounds.

Josh



		
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