Thanks for the interest, Michael. I don't use Ogg, so I'm a little wary that standard FLAC would be left out of any Ogg Frog implementation. But I say that mostly out of ignorance. I have noticed that there seem to be two worlds for FLAC, inside Ogg and outside. It's important to be aware of the fact that many hardware devices support the FLAC format directly, without the Ogg container/wrapper. I would want the ability to convert FLAC to CAF directly, hopefully without an intermediate Ogg file (since I'm talking about file sizes where each is over 4 GB).
QuickTime is a very good suggestion, and gets two platforms supported rather than one, as the AudioFile API in CoreAudio would do. However, QuickTime tends to be rather limited, and when developers run into those limitations, Apple engineers tend to recommend that folks turn to CoreAudio for full support. Also, I really would like to support Unix, assuming that there are as many Unix folks using FLAC as there are Windows users taking advantage of this underground format. As for the patent question, it's a very smart question, but I think as soon as any interested developer looks at the CAF specification from Apple, it should be readily apparent what the legal ramifications are. My hunch is that Apple does not want to encumber the format, but I'll let their public documents speak for them. In any event, it's a very good issue to be aware of from the start. Thanks again for the comments, and be sure to keep us informed if you do anything. Brian Willoughby Sound Consulting On Oct 12, 2008, at 21:25, Michael Crawford wrote: On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 7:26 PM, Brian Willoughby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Is anyone here potentially up to the task of adding support for CAF > (the CoreAudio Format) into the flac command-line? This would > present minimal difficulty under OSX, due to the presence of the > CoreAudio API, but the real challenge would be to support CAF on Unix > and Windows - everywhere that flac is now available. I expect I could do it as part of my work on Ogg Frog: http://www.oggfrog.com/free-music-software In the short term, I would do it by accessing the QuickTime APIs - which *are* available on Windows, if you install either iTunes or QuickTime for Windows. (The iTunes install includes QuickTime.) In the long term, I could write a codec for it that would be straightforward to integrate into the flac command-line tool. That would allow its use on UNIX. HOWEVER! Is the CoreAudio file format or its associated algorithms patented? QuickTime in general has many patents. A patent wouldn't stop me from writing the source code, but a binary couldn't be provided by anyone in a country that recognizes software patents. Mike _______________________________________________ Flac-dev mailing list Flac-dev@xiph.org http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev