[gst-devel] flac track seeking

[Dave Collett]

G'day all,
My cd's are all backed up into single FLAC files with an embedded "toc"
(or cue-sheet), this is a standard feature of the FLAC encoder, nothing
fancy that I have done.

Anyhow, I want to be able to add my flac albums to rhythmbox and have
them show up as individual tracks. As I started hacking away at
rhythmbox, it became aparent to me that it would be best achieved by
modifying the flac gst-plugin. ie. add a new "format" to the flac
decoder, "track_format", so that one could seek to a track, just like
the cdparanoia plugin. I could also add extra properties like cddb_id
and so on, pretty much by pilliaging code from the cdparania plugin. 

This way, one could treat a flac file (with embedded cuesheet) just like
an actual CD, and gstreamer apps(rhythmbox) can easily access the
individual tracks. If this is a success I suppose it might be possible
to modify the flac encoder also, such that one can transcode a cd into a
flac-cuesheet file in one easy step. With the price of disks these days,
backing up cd's to flac is a great option if you don't want to sacrifice
audio quality.

Does anyone else think this is a good idea? Do you have any
comments/suggestions/traps for new players etc, that I should know about
before commencing on this work?

Thanks,
Dave