[Flac-dev] Support .cda as input files

Brian Willoughby
Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:10:02 -0000

Those .cda files do not appear on Mac OS X.  Instead, when you put in
an audio CD, the operating system provide .aiff files with the audio
data bytes in CD format.  FLAC supports AIFF, and Mac OS X supports
AIFF, so perhaps you should find a plugin for your operating system
which presents AIFF or WAV files instead of CDA.

To respond to your suggestion from another angle, the FLAC command-
line is open source.  If you are interested in CDA support, then find
a spec for the format and contribute the code needed to input (and
output) that format.  It already supports raw, wav, and aiff.  That's
quite a lot considering.  Most simple users are going to use a GUI
app anyway, so your suggestions are better presented to the authors
of those GUI programs.  Many of them do support additional formats.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting


On Sep 13, 2007, at 12:41, Daniel Aleksandersen wrote:

On 2007-09-13, Brian wrote:
> On Sep 13, 2007, at 12:08, Daniel Aleksandersen wrote:
>> I would really like to see support for .cda as input files. The cda
>> format
>> is the one used on regular audio CDs.
>>
>> Support for this format would make it even easier to encode to FLAC
>>  from CDs
>
> You are mistaken, Daniel.  Regular audio CDs do not use any kind of
> "file format"
> CDDA consists of a stream of audio data with metadata codes in a
> bitstream - there are no files, only a continuous stream of bits,
> frames, blocks, etc.
> The .cda files that you see are created by converting the raw CDDA
> data to a file - they are not to be confused with the original.
> The FLAC command-line conversion utility supports "raw" input,
which
> is the closest thing to regular audio CD format that you can get.

I know that. However when you put an audio CD in a computer you will see
them as files with the .cda extension. Supporting this ?format? would
make
encoding simpler as users would not need to ?rip? to a format, but could
drag and drop the files from the CD to the computer.