[Flac] FLAC format: "autonomous" documentation

[Brian Willoughby]

Good point.  But, gee, doesn't the source code serve as a provably- 
complete documentation of the format?  It's able to be compiled into  
a program that can decode all files.

I'm only half serious.  Source code is not the most concise way to  
describe a format.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting


On Jan 28, 2009, at 11:20, porte64 at free.fr wrote:
> I read through the specifications here:
> http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html
> but the document is not "autonomous".
>
> Instead, sections entitled "prediction" and "residual coding",
> use external references, some of with are unavailable
> (dead link) or in poor state.
>
> What i mean here is that it is not possible to
> write a decoder from scratch using only the spec document:
> it's OK fo metadata, but apparently does not tell
> everything about the audio data format.
>
> To make sure everyone will be able to decode
> FLAC data in decades from now, it would be nice
> to have a single, self-contained document
> about audio data in FLAC files !
>
> Paul