LFLAC support by Promiznivas at 4:56 PM EDT on June 15, 2016
Are LFLACs supported in vgmstream yet? I did find some older source code that makes mention of it.
However, vgmstream r1024 does seem to open neither regular FLACs renamed to LFLAC nor Ogg FLAC files renamed to LOGG.
I should note that Ogg Vorbis files renamed to LOGG work like a charm and can be easily looped by setting a LOOPSTART flag with the sample values in the Ogg file's tags.
For those asking what this could be used for: LFLACs would be unique in that they would allow for lossless compression and seamless, looping playback at the same time.
I put up a very small LOGG file just to show what it's like. This is Hans Zimmer's "First Step" from his Interstellar score. It was recompressed to Ogg Vorbis from some extracted YouTube audio, but it gets the idea across. Didn't Konami even use looping OGGs with Castlevania Rebirth?
Looping Oggs are used a lot in games, which is why we have looping Ogg (Vorbis) support. FLAC isn't in any distributed version mostly because I didn't want to go through whatever would have been involved in getting the .dll right.
We do have looping WAV support via a few mechanisms, the easiest is an extra .pos file. Again, all of this came from games using it already.
well, a while back, I wrote loopplayer. it's a browser-based Web Audio program that encodes sample rate and loop points in the file name, resulting in ugly-looking files. The file format can be anything supported by Web Audio, which excludes Opus on Chrome :(.
It's hosted in Github Pages, and used for my videos. At some point, I need to set up a page with a list of songs. Right now, you need to memorize the file names. (Github Pages won't even let you list the directory of files!)
The file name loop points can coexist with LOGG loop points, making them compatible with both loopplayer and vgmtrans. In fact, that's what I'm planning to do in the future.
But thanks to everyone for the information. Looks like I didn't search thoroughly enough, there's also this thread. And a German VGM enthusiast seems to have looked into looping FLAC files by putting the loop points as sample values in a TXT (so it's similar to the POS implementation, only human-readable), see their video here.
People might call me a staunch preservationist. I don't like the idea of splitting data for a purpose such as playback up into two separate files, as is the case with creating a POS or TXT file for loop points. Tags and embedded loop point values are the only way to effectively share and preserve such data over time.
That said, here's a sample file that compares a WAV to an LWAV file with embedded loop points. The LWAV version was created with Wavosaur. However, seeing how the smpl chunk affects the file size and thus the header of the file, and how Wavosaur messes with the rest of the file as well, this is rather finicky.
The cleanest way is to put the loop points in a dedicated tag field, leaving all data outside of the file's tag unaffected.
For the time being, these are just random musings...
At the risk of self-promotion, loopplayer doesn't change file contents at all. But files take a few seconds to load (downloads and decodes the entire file first). Of course, codec support is limited by your web browser. In particular, Web Audio codec support is often worse than HTML5 (Chrome lacks Opus support).
> To prepare files for loopplayer, rename them to name.samplerate.loopstart.loopend.extension
<dead github link removed>
Someone should write a foobar2000 plugin to read loop points.