[vorbis-dev] Bride of vorbisfile questions

[John Morton]

On Thursday 18 December 2003 17:42, Graham Mitchell wrote:
>  > Treating a collection of logical streams as separate tracks makes
>  > captured streams much more useful.
>
>  To some.  I never do this, and I don't think I ever would.  I really,
> really like having one track per physical file.  Though, to be fair, maybe
> if I saw it in action, I'd change my opinion.

It is a bit chicken and egg. What I'm doing with my fork of the xmms plugin is 
exploring the kinds of things you could potentially do with vorbis. To some 
extent cating tracks together as a single file is only advantageous if the 
users don't loose any conveniences they're used to in the process, which 
means starting at the plugin.

>  > It seems to me you'd always be better off going back to
>  > the source material or decoding to PCM and just dealing with the minimal
>  > quality loss of a later encode.
>
>  I would personally much rather never have the possibility of treating
> logical streams as separate tracks, if it meants I could get lossless
> Vorbis editing in Audacity.

As far as I can tell, the only kind of lossless editing can do is spliting and 
concatenating, which is a pretty limited set of editing, and the spliting 
case is unaffected by what we interpret logical streams to be.

>  To each his own.  Hopefully there's a way both can happen.

It's quite feasible for me to only treat logical streams as separate from some 
previous stream if it doesn't have vorbis comments of it's own, but that 
sucks if you want to use the plugin to add comments later. Hm.

>  Personally I use Vorbis in a radio station-like environment, where I'm
>  randomly choosing dozens of single tracks every hour from a hard drive
> full of 1883 songs on 149 albums (all but four of which I personally own,
> BTW). This is easy with perl and shell and ogg123, and would be much harder
> if each album were a single file.

You don't _need_ to store albums that way, and you can use oggsplit on any you 
happen to find. The thing is that even if there did exist some slick gui 
oggsplit program for windows, it's still makes that form of album 
distribution a bit inconvenient.

>  Of course, I'm producing my own oggs, so it doesn't matter what I think,
>  since I'm free to keep doing things my own way even if the rest of the
> world switches to album-based oggfiles.  Such is the beauty of open source.

Exactly. Meanwhile, people who tune in to your streams can capture them and 
replay them later, less the tracks they don't like, or on shuffle or 
whatever. 

>  Just thought I'd weigh in before this thread completely devolves into "my
>  interpretation is better because it makes coding my personal project
>  easier/possible".

Fair enough. I expect the only way to resolve it might be to kick out both 
interpretations in implementation and see which people find the most useful. 
At the end of the day an Audacity edited stream will still play, it will just 
tend to spam the playlist. 

John

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