[Flac-dev] Support .cda as input files

[David Collett]

Hi All,

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 06:04:59PM -0700, Stephen F. Booth wrote:
>> I think that what I actually want is for the operating systems to use 
>> .flac
>> instead. Similar to what Mac OS X does with .aiff. This should probably
>> have been posted in the advocacy emailing list instead.
>
> This is an interesting idea.  There already is a FUSE filesystem called 
> mp3fs (http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/) which can dynamically transcode files 
> from FLAC to MP3.  Perhaps someone should write flacfs?

Hmm, that would be cool. Then you could mount mp3fs over the top of it!

> The challenge for using FLAC would be to determine/predict/estimate the 
> FLAC file size in advance.  Technical difficulties aside, I think the idea 
> of popping in a CD and having the files show up as FLAC would be an 
> appealing one to users.

Yes, this is a challenge. I am the author of mp3fs, and a major
challenge was to predict final file size accurately. This is why mp3fs
only supports CBR mp3 and not VBR mp3 or ogg (which is inherently VBR).
Is there a 'CBR' flac encoding mechanism?

> I suppose another alternative would be to hack on cddafs or one of its 
> cousins to add FLAC support.

I hadn't heard of cddafs before, looks kinda neat. Unfortunately, it
looks like a kernel-mode filesystem which would be impossible to hack
flac support into (unless you want to port flac into kernel space :))
FUSE filesystems are much easier as you can use userspace libs.

Dave