[flac-dev] Looking for users of --keep-foreign-metadata

[Martijn van Beurden]

Hi all,

Currently I'm looking for users of the --keep-foreign-metadata feature
of FLAC. There has been some improvement of this feature in FLAC
1.4.0. Since 2007 there has been a warning in FLAC that
--keep-foreign-metadata is a new feature. I think removal of this
warning is long overdue, but there are still some issues surrounding
it.

So, if there are users of this feature on the mailing list, could they
perhaps speak up? Can this feature be considered 'complete'? Currently
FLAC stores the top-level RIFF chunk and fmt chunk on encoding, but
does not restore them on decoding, is this considered a problem or
shortcoming?

I know for example that WavPack will restore a WAVE file bit-for-bit,
even if there is ambiguous or even invalid data stored in the format
chunk. I don't think such behaviour is something that FLAC should
strive for. The current behaviour of storing metadata that is not
essential for decoding the file, for example CUE, LIST, bext chunks,
is I think sufficient, but I would like to hear the opinion of people
that actually use this feature.

Kind regards,

Martijn van Beurden