[Flac] Audio tracks and channels in OggFLAC

[Terry Hancock]

Hi all,

I'm getting mired in conflicting and dated information, so I think I
need to ask this of live humans... :-)

I'm essentially trying to create an Ogg file that works like DVD video does.

In particular, in addition to the Theora video stream, there will be
multiple audio "tracks" (By "track", I mean a collection of channels
to be played all at once, but only one track should be played at a
time).

Each track may have a number of channels, e.g.: 1 for mono, 2 for
stereo, 6 for 5.1 surround sound.

The tracks can be FLAC or Vorbis or a mixture of the two.

So, for example, I might have:

Track 1 - English 5.1 Surround  (6 channels)
Track 2 - English Stereo           (2 channels)
Track 3 - French Mono             (1 channel)
Track 4 - Spanish Stereo          (2 channels)

I have just (finally!) found  5.1 channel assignments for FLAC and
Vorbis, and wouldn't-you-know, they disagree:

Vorbis       FLAC
L               L
R              R
LS            LFE
RS           LS
LFE         RS

Fortunately, stereo and mono seem to be fairly tame.

The tracks can be FLAC or Vorbis or a mixture of the two.

Anybody know what the state of the art is now?

Right now, I'm thinking, the "best practice" is going to be to
multiplex _channels_ within the audio codec (i.e. FLAC or Vorbis),
while each _track_ is a separate audio stream in the Ogg file.

Does that make sense?

Do players actually support this?

And

What tools exist to merge separate single-channel FLAC files into a
multichannel FLAC?

I already know of the ogg-tools and oggz-tools utilities for
manipulating the Ogg streams, so I think I have that part covered.

Thanks!
Terry