[Flac-dev] Flac and lyrics

[Conrad Parker]

2009/9/1 Ben Allison <benski at winamp.com>:
> Both MPEG-4 File Format (mp4) and Matroska (mkv) have an interesting
> format for lyrics and subtitles.  Since these container formats can
> contain multiple contain streams, lyrics or subtitles are just another
> "stream" interleaved with the rest of the data.  They are synchronized by
> having timestamps like any other stream.  The payload is just text data.
>
> If you don't care about synchronizing the lyrics with the music, stuffing
> the lyrics in the metadata is the most simple and straightforward way.
>
> For a single stream file format like FLAC, you can't interleave a timed
> lyrics track, although you could put the entire block of data up-front in
> an application metadata block as Brian suggests.
>
> You could also put FLAC in an mkv container which would allow you take
> advantage of matroska's lyrics support.  FLAC streams in the matroska
> spec, but I'm unsure what media players support this combination (and if
> the ones that do support it will also support lyrics)

Similarly Ogg Kate could be useful:

http://wiki.xiph.org/OggKate

which you could make by adding a kate stream to a normal ogg flac file.

Conrad.