[Flac-dev] Support for CAF in flac command-line?

[Brian Willoughby]

Hello all,

Is anyone here potentially up to the task of adding support for CAF  
(the CoreAudio Format) into the flac command-line?  This would  
present minimal difficulty under OSX, due to the presence of the  
CoreAudio API, but the real challenge would be to support CAF on Unix  
and Windows - everywhere that flac is now available.

Although the format is rather unknown, there are some very specific  
advantages to adding CAF support.  I have the Sound Devices 702  
recorder, which supports FLAC.  I've already made some recordings  
that are so long that they cannot be uncompressed from FLAC to WAV or  
AIFF because they would exceed 4 GB - the maximum file size for those  
formats.  CAF does not have the same 4 GB limitations.

Of course, in instances where there is a natural break in a  
recording, the flac command-line allows decompression ending at a  
specific time and/or starting at a specific time - meaning that you  
can create a 4 GB or smaller WAV/AIFF by only extracting a subset.   
However, there are inevitably situations where unbroken recordings  
can be made in FLAC format which are too big to fit into legacy formats.

I believe that Apple has documented the CAF details sufficiently for  
a developer to support the format without direct use of Apple Mac OS  
X API.  I scanned the document once, and it seems reasonably straight- 
forward.  I'd just on this myself, but I don't have time at the  
moment.  While I might eventually be able to get around to it, I  
though it prudent to suggest the feature to the FLAC Developer  
community at least in case someone else has time to implement this on  
a shorter time frame.

I'm sure it's something that would be appreciated by the unique  
community of people who use FLAC and still need the ability to  
convert to other formats for processing.  I guess this would still  
limit the usability to Logic Studio Pro, at least until more  
companies begin supporting CAF in their audio software.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting