[Flac] Increasing number of channels?

[Martin Leese]

Brian Willoughby wrote:

> The stream header only has 3 bits for the channel count, so it's not
> possible to support more than 8 channels without breaking compatibility with
> all embedded products that support FLAC, not to mention old and existing
> software.

A second problem is that of interleaving.  This
is described in the following 2009 post to the
flac-dev list:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2009-September/002709.html

...
> There might still be a solution for you, though. Ogg and other formats can
> embed FLAC data inside another container, so it might be possible to create
> a 16-channel "FLAC" in an Ogg container as two 8-channel FLAC files or even
> as eight stereo FLAC files for maximum compression. I don't know whether Ogg
> is optimized for streaming such that it could interleave multiple FLAC files
> this way, but it's worth investigating.

Using OggFLAC with multiple FLAC streams
would also solve the interleaving problem.
However, it creates the problem of where and
how to store metadata describing which FLAC
stream contains what channels.

Regards,
Martin
-- 
Martin J Leese
E-mail: martin.leese  stanfordalumni.org
Web: http://members.tripod.com/martin_leese/