[Flac-dev] FLAC support for Android?

[Brian Willoughby]

Hi Ben.  A quick scan of the Android information I could find online  
indicates that Java is the primary development environment.  You're  
not going to be able to create a feasible FLAC implementation in  
Java.  Instead, you'll need to use GCC to compile the C code in the  
FLAC library for the ARM processor in the Android platform.  So, I'm  
not surprised that OpenCore is written in C.

Also, to be useful, the new FLAC code will have to be hooked into the  
operating system so that it is universally recognized as a valid  
audio format.  That doesn't seem like a small feat.  The bug you  
cited lists some of the changes that would be needed.

An alternative would be to modify the music player only, so that it  
supports FLAC even if the rest of Android does not.  This would be an  
inferior solution.

Finally, I suggest that you start small, and try to introduce a  
simple audio format as an addition to Android.  If you can add a new  
format successfully, then you should be able to take the next step  
and compile the FLAC library as another added audio file format.

I believe that some work has been done in the FLAC community to  
support optimized ARM compilations, but I do not have any recent  
information on this.

Anyway, it would be really cool to see FLAC on Android, and as people  
are saying, it would be very appropriate.  FLAC was designed to work  
on small platforms as well as large, so it should be possible if  
Android supports added audio formats.

Good luck.  When you get to specific questions, I'm sure you'll find  
some help from this list.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting


On Feb 23, 2009, at 14:21, Ben McCann wrote:
I was wondering if anyone here had thought about FLAC support on the  
Android.  It would be great for FLAC adoption.
There's a bug open for it on which I've posted some details about how  
I think it would need to be implemented.  It appears to me that it  
would need to be added to the OpenCore component, which is written in C.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/attachments/20090223/815695a2/attachment.htm