[linux-audio-dev] WAVE-EX File Format Spec

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Fred Gleason wrote:

> I've been eyeing Libsndfile for the past couple of years.  It looks quite 
> solid.  We've been using the Secret Rabbit for some time now, and are very 
> pleased with it.  The only thing that really has kept us from 
> enthusiastically adopting Libsndfile as well has been lack of Broadcast Wave 
> File (BWF) support. 

I've been extremely busy for some time working on an improved converter
for Secret Rabbit Code (as well as life in general). Since the Rabbit 
actually earns me a modest income it has priority over all other free 
time coding.

When I get a bit of time (yeah right :-)) I'll take a look at the
BWF stuff.

> Given your 
> long-standing policy of non-support for MPEG, I was not sure if this was 
> something you would be interested in adding to libsndfile.

MP3 has patent problems. The encoder is patented and the patent 
holder does send the ocassional nasty-gram to people distributing
MP3 codecs without a license. Even if I personally could avoid this
issue, having MP3 support in libsndfile may make it impossible for 
the big Linux distributions to ship libsndfile with their offerings
(or at least without stripping the MP3 code).

However, since you already have a hardware MPEG codec (where the
hardware manufacturer pays the licensing fees), you might want 
to look at the sf_read_raw/sf_write_raw interfaces:

   http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/api.html#raw

The warning about reading/writing compressed format being undefined
is mainly warning about mixing raw read/writes with standard read/
writes which use libsndfile's internal codecs. This would not be
an issue for your case.

Maybe we can come up with something that allows you to use your
external MPEG codec with libsndfile (time permitting).

Erik

PS : Libsndfile is very close to having full Ogg Vorbis support
     (Conrad ???). Would that be enough for you to drop or at 
     least partially replace MP3?
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo  nospam at mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
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