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Zeugma440 / atldotnet

Fully managed, portable and easy-to-use C# library to read and edit audio data and metadata (tags) from various audio formats, playlists and CUE sheets
MIT License
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Matroska audio container support #57

Closed TheMinefighter closed 1 month ago

TheMinefighter commented 4 years ago

The problem

I would love to see support (at least read) for matroska audio containers (*.mka), which are quite popular

Details

MKA files are currently not working with ATL. For technical details about the format there is the official specification page.

Zeugma440 commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion and the specs page. I'm gonna look into it.

However I'm quite surprised to hear they are quite popular, as I'm an audio fan myself, and have not come across these yet.

Could you tell me -for my own curiosity- in which circles/domains they are popular ? And most importantly, do you know where I can find sample files ?

TheMinefighter commented 4 years ago

Matroska is popular in the open source world (at least here in Germany), due to the fact that all of it is open source, that they are widely supported (even natively on Windows) and it has an extensive feature set that other formats (e.g. .opus) don't have. Sample files of course can be generated with ffmpeg, use -codec:a [Codec] for different codecs. If you need any help with sample files feel free to contact me.

Zeugma440 commented 4 years ago

Alright, thanks for answering. I'll see what I can do in the following weeks. I'm in the process of releasing another project, so it might not be immediate 😉

In any case, I'll let you know by posting in this Github issue.

Zeugma440 commented 4 years ago

Test files https://github.com/Matroska-Org/matroska-test-files/tree/master/test_files https://kodi.wiki/view/Samples https://mkvtoolnix.download/samples/

Zeugma440 commented 4 years ago

In my very own opinion, the MKV container illustrates the definition of "overengineered" : it covers all expected features of a multimedia container, allows flexibility, occupies just the required disk space without any useless byte.... but boy, the more I'm reading, the more I realize I need to read even more stuff.

The underlying EBML binary format -their very own creation- is also quite a piece of art (think "Escher" - extremely well structured but very intricate, to the point of convolution) compared to what I've seen on all the other formats the library supports.

In conclusion, implementing support for MKV inside the ATL library without relying on MKV tools will be a long, hard path to follow, especially if we aim at reading and writing data.

I'm leaving this issue open but I don't guarantee it will be implemented soon.

loudenvier commented 1 year ago

I'm in the process of writing a file "auto-organizer" application (for my own sanity as I can't organize my library manually anymore, but will be releasing it as open source) and I was looking at Metadata Extractor to extract metadata for common files, then realized they didn't support the matroska container. So I planned to add support to mkv back into Metadata Extractor by using either NEbml or Matroska (which uses NEbml)... Then I found your library which already does something I'll have to do myself: normalize common tags (like title, author, etc.). And stumbled on this request and fully agree with your comment regarding the container format :-)

That said, it can be somewhat easy to add support for matroska (and webml) using those two libraries. If you don't want to add new dependencies, you can extract the bare minimum code to read only the "Tags" EBML Segment. Or it could be added as an "extra" project which depends on NEbl or Matroska but don't pollute the core project.

Anyway, now that I've found your library I will certainly be using it (with or without matroska support :-) Thanks for the great work.

Zeugma440 commented 1 year ago

Thanks for the kind words @loudenvier

I should at least give it a try to see how large is the bare minimum code to do what is needed in ATL

loudenvier commented 1 year ago

I'll give it a shot! I've found another dotnet library which is simpler to use and looks fast. I could just add it directly from the source to prevent any needless dependency. Will post back as a PR so you can see if it's good enough, change it if its not or reject it is bad :-)

Zeugma440 commented 1 month ago

I eventually decided to do something about MKA, using the fantastic https://github.com/LostBeard/SpawnDev.EBML library to dodge the chore of writing an EBML parser.

Reading looks super fine so far. Expect a new release soon~

Zeugma440 commented 1 month ago

Read-only MKA support is available in today's v6.01.

Writing support currently depends on SpawnDev.EBML's help on issues I encountered.

Please note that WebA support might theoretically work, but I never had the chance to test it as I don't have any sample file.

You're welcome to open new issues if you find any problem when reading MKA or WebA files.

Zeugma440 commented 1 month ago

FYI, write support has been added today, and all Matroska-related code is now fully integrated with the rest of the library