[vorbis-dev] Formats other than Vorbis in Ogg

[Jonathan Stewart]

  I have a question about Ogg.  (which, ironically, means i'm posting to 
the wrong list.  I don't know of an Ogg list though, and if i'm posting 
to the wrong list, please inform and forgive me)

A while back I read how some of the developers had added MIDI support to 
the Ogg stream format.  While just in early stages, this reminded me of 
a thought that had been passing through my mind before.

What formats does Ogg intend to support?  I know that there's work on 
Ogg Tarkin going on.  But what about putting a plain wave file into the 
Ogg framework?  Or, even better, ressurecting Ogg Squish.  Many people, 
when posting audio samples, include the Vorbis file (of course) and then 
a wave file.  Then other users tell them to put into flac format, to 
save space.  Why couldn't flac be integrated into Ogg?  Since Ogg Squish 
is dead, what about Ogg Flac?  In fact, i seem to remember rumblings 
about this a long time ago.

 From what I understand, most of the work right now with Vorbis is going 
into fine tuning the lossy compression codec so that it sounds the best 
it can.  All the bitstream formatting and fucntional details are pretty 
much solid and in a production state.  Doesn't this mean that a working 
product, like flac, could be integrated into the Ogg framework without 
too much trouble?

I think this would be a good idea, and pretty cool, too.  It would unify 
the tools and players.  For example, in Winamp or XMMS, you'd only need 
an Ogg plugin to play back wav's, flac's, vorbis's, midi's.  And you'd 
only need one encoder to do this as well.  In Grip (or some other tool) 
you'd just pass a '-flac' switch and you'd have lossless instead of 
lossy Ogg audio files.  Not to mention you could tag these files in the 
same way that you can tag Vorbis files, which is pretty useful in 
itself.  (this can be done, right?)

Of course, all this involves work that's above and beyond my abilities, 
unfortunately, so i'm really asking you guys to do more work than you 
already are doing.  (hopefully i'll learn this stuff in the future, but 
for now...)

Anyways, i got a little long winded there, but thanks for listening.

Jonathan Stewart
the first one of my friends on the Ogg Vorbis bandwagon, and proud of it!

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