[Flac] Flac metadata at end?

[Alex Jones]

Hi, Nick

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 20:29 +0100, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
> Flac is great, but I have some questions about the way the metadata is stored.  
> It takes an age to retag the file because all the data has to be shuffled 
> around the disk.  For most formats (ogg, mp3) the filesize is small, but I 
> was thinking, why not have the metadata at the end of the file?  
> 
> This would not really be a problem for streaming, since you just read out the 
> metadata from the end first, the hop back to the beginning, and you could 
> differentiate the two systems with some identifier, like starting the file 
> with fLAC instead of fLaC, so that old decoders just reject the new format, 
> but new ones know to read the last 4B (int) to find the offset for where to 
> find the data. It then jumps back to the beginning.  Conversion between the 
> formats is no problem.  Am I totally overreacting, or do I have some 
> justification?  It takes about 5 mins to change some track data for a cd, 
> even encoded at best.  This is really not very user friendly, and going 
> through and adding lots of padding to the batch of cds I just ripped, then 
> adding the data, then removing all the padding is a bit cumbersome.

I think the consequences outweigh the benefits. Having metadata at the
beginning of the file serves as metadata and gives you important
information such as expected stream length. Pushing this to the back for
the sake of making tag updates quicker seems a bit of a bad move to me -
how often do you re-tag your files?

> 
> Nick
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-- 
Alex Jones <alex at weej.com>