[vorbis-dev] ogg123 ^C changes

[Beni Cherniavksy]

On 2002-02-06, Ross Vandegrift wrote:

> > > Is the general consensus in favor of Ctrl-C skipping links instead
> > > of files?
> >
> > No.  I'd really like to veto this one.  File should be the basic audio unit
> > (some have used the term "track" in this discussion).  Chaining is handy if
> > you want to string several audio segments together, but you should treat the
> > finished product (conceptually) as one big segment.  If that's not what you
> > want, you shouldn't have chained the file.
>
> While I think I agree with this personally, why should using chained oggs as an
> album management system be discouraged?
>
Because if it's used for sample-accurate-editing (split -> edit middle
part -> cat) then you still have the same one logical piece of audio but
it consists of several chained links.  There is no way toavoid this in
editing, except the original and re-encoding.  So if you allow editing,
you can't distinguish anymore between logically meaningful and meaningless
boundaries.  Editing is a useful feature sometimes, so it's best to
entirely avoid using chaining to indicate logical boundaries.

> ie:
>
> TheyMightBeGiants-All.ogg contains:
> 	Pink_Album.ogg contains:
> 		Everything_Right_Is_Wrong_Again.ogg
> 		...
> 	Lincoln.ogg contains:
> 		Ana_Ng.ogg
> 		...
> 	...
>
> Now, when TMBG puts out a new album, I rip and encode all the tracks, package
> them up into a chained ogg, and chain that ogg onto my TMBG ogg chain (of
> chained oggs).  This is why I previously asked about transporting Ogg over Ogg.
>
Note that chaining works by just concatenating several ogg streams.  It
does not create any wrapping structure around them.  Therefore if you
concatenate several chained files, you get one chained file representing a
_flat_ list of all the links.  If you intend to put chained streams in
another layer of ogg, in order to represent hierarchy, that's
theoretically doable but it's not standard - no existing tools can play
such files!

Also note that names aren't attached to the links when chaining.  If you
wan't to have many files in one, with filesystem data recorded, just use
any archive format, tar will do best (since futher comression of vorbis
is mostly a waste of CPU, an uncomressed archive format is preferred;
besides it probably will be more or less playable - the tar headers will
be skipped as garbage!).  Or just use directories, they were invented just
for that ;)

> Again, I'm not sure this is a good idea.  Just curious as to why this kind of
> thing should be discouraged.
>


-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at tx.technion.ac.il>
                 (also scben at t2 in Technion)

Best way to lose ~6GB music and other personal files: create a roaming
profile on another computer pointing to your My Documents instead of your
profile dir; logon - it won't find your settings; so logout - it will be
"saving your settings" very long time because it is busy deleting all
unrecognized things in your directory.  [Personally experienced on win2k].

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