* Runs on Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris and probably other
Unixes
- * Mp3, ogg/vorbis, ogg/speex, aac (m4a) and wma support
+ * Mp3, ogg/vorbis, ogg/speex, aac (m4a), wma and flac support
* Native Alsa, OSS, CoreAudio output support
* Support for ESD, Pulseaudio, AIX, Solaris, IRIX through libao
* Local or remote http, dccp and udp network audio streaming
- XREFERENCE(http://www.speex.org/, speex). In order to stream
or decode speex files, libspeex (libspeex-dev) is required.
+ - XREFERENCE(http://flac.sourceforge.net/, flac). To stream
+ or decode files encoded with the _Free Lossless Audio Codec_,
+ libFLAC (libFLAC-dev) must be installed.
+
- XREFERENCE(ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/lib/, alsa-lib). On
Linux, you'll need to have ALSA's development package
libasound2-dev installed.
is composed of superframes, each containing one or more frames of
2048 samples. For 16 bit stereo a WMA superframe is about 8K large.
+*FLAC*
+
+The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) compresses audio without quality
+loss. It gives better compression ratios than a general purpose
+compressor like zip or bzip2 because FLAC is designed specifically
+for audio. A FLAC-encoded file consits of frames of varying size, up
+to 16K. Each frame starts with a header that contains all information
+necessary to decode the frame.
+
Meta data
~~~~~~~~~
32 characters long. ID3, version 2 is much more flexible but requires
a separate library being installed for paraslash to support it.
-Ogg vorbis files contain meta data as Vorbis comments, which are
-typically implemented as strings of the form "[TAG]=[VALUE]". Unlike
-ID3 version 1 tags, one may use whichever tags are appropriate for
-the content.
+Ogg vorbis, ogg speex and flac files contain meta data as Vorbis
+comments, which are typically implemented as strings of the form
+"[TAG]=[VALUE]". Unlike ID3 version 1 tags, one may use whichever
+tags are appropriate for the content.
AAC files usually use the MPEG-4 container format for storing meta
data while WMA files wrap meta data as special objects within the
of an audio file. For MP3 files, a chunk is the same as an MP3 frame,
while for OGG files a chunk is an OGG page, etc. Therefore the chunk
size varies considerably between audio formats, from a few hundred
-bytes (MP3) up to 8K (WMA).
+bytes (MP3) up to 16K (FLAC).
The chunk table contains the offsets within the audio file that
correspond to the chunk boundaries of the file. Like the meta data,