Don't overlook the FLAC in Ogg container solution. That's established as a standard for some time now, as far as I know, and would probably be better than a new, proprietary multi mono bundle. I haven't used it myself, but people have been talking about it for a while, and I believe that some "FLAC" users are actually working with FLAC in Ogg container files.
Brian Willoughby On Jan 27, 2017, at 12:55 AM, Olivier Tristan <o.tris...@uvi.net> wrote: > Thanks everybody for their answer. > > This is quite unfortunate for me, but hey, that's life. > > I will probably end up doing some multi mono bundle similar to what Protools > did back in the days with its .L .R files > > Le 26/01/2017 à 18:58, Martin Leese a écrit : >> Federico Miyara wrote: >> ... >>> The file format allows some unused fields for future use, such as the >>> padding block. It could include a flag to indicate a change in the >>> format adding one more streaminfo byte which would allow up to 256 >>> channels (actually, 256 + 8), or it could trigger a new byte when 11111111. >>> >>> There is also an invalid block identifier (127) which could be used with >>> the same purpose. >> The problem isn't *just* the 3-bit field used for >> the number of channels. As Brian Willoughby >> explained: >> ... >>>> As you cram more channels into a block, you get fewer samples per block for >>>> each individual channel. There simply isn't any advantage to having lots of >>>> channels in a single stream. >>>> >>>> I believe that Ogg allows you to create a file that interleaves multiple >>>> FLAC files. >> Perhaps comparing FLAC with the Ogg >> container and Vorbis codec will aid >> understanding. >> >> With Ogg, different streams can be either >> chained (sequential) or grouped >> (parallel/interleaved). Typically, metadata >> streams would be chained (so they appear >> before any audio data) and audio streams >> would be grouped. >> >> Within a single FLAC stream the audio is >> split into blocks which are grouped. But within >> each block the eight channels are chained. >> This makes sense with a maximum of only >> eight channels. Within a Vorbis stream the >> audio is split into frames which are grouped. >> Because a Vorbis stream can contain up to >> 256 channels, within each frame the channels >> are also grouped. >> >> So the maximum of eight channels is really >> embedded into the FLAC standard. To change >> this would require a whole new standard (or >> the use of multiple grouped FLAC streams in >> an Ogg container). >> >> Regards, >> Martin > _______________________________________________ flac-dev mailing list flac-dev@xiph.org http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev