[flac-dev] C API: How to get a seektable for very long files?

[Stefan Oltmanns]

Am 16.10.24 um 02:02 schrieb brianw:
> I am not an SDR user, but I think it would be a great idea to design and register an application metadata block for FLAC that supports these needs.
>
> The fields in this application-specific metadata block could document how many files there are in total; which file in the sequence the current file is; what the actual sample rate is; how many bits in each sample are valid (to a finer degree than FLAC registers).
>
> One thing to do is start this SDRm block with a revision number, so, if the community adds more fields later, then supporting software will know which fields to expect.

I'm wondering, aren't vorbis comments maybe good for some of this, they
are flexible and extensible. And for things the decoder doesn't need to
know they should be perfectly fine?

>
> I don't think that extra metadata can get around limitations in total samples or seek table fields. One topic that I never studied is how FLAC differs between files and streams. For a file, any sizes or references need to have limits, otherwise handling an unlimited value can be difficult to verify on all compatible software. For a stream, though, total samples or seek information would seem completely unusable for a stream. So, I'm wondering what a pure FLAC stream should even do with such information.

The question is: What will the decoder do with that metadata, just read
a provide a new API call to be able to get from the application, or will
it override the standard metadata?

Best regards
Stefan