WMA tag support for TagLib

[Scott Wheeler]

On Saturday 12 March 2005 2:06, you wrote:
> Hi Scott,
>
> I'm happy to make a TagLib addon, but it's not clear to me from the code
>   what is the correct way to do that, in the sense that there isn't a
> registration mechanism; it's implicit in the dispatching. I could in
> principle subclass the TagLib interface classes and build a separate
> library, but then I would need to keep it synced with TagLib changes,
> even if the WMA portion would be unaffected.

Right, that's why I mentioned a registration mechanism.

But really the FileRef mimetype resolution is mostly just there for 
demo-purposes and it actually says so in the docs.  That's something that 
I've wanted to make a little easier to work with in general for 1.4.

Other than that you wouldn't have to track the changes to any significant 
degree as at least until 2.0 the API is guaranteed to stay binary compatible.

> A cleaner and lower-maintenance way might if I could distribute a
> libwma.so (right now, it makes libwma.la to link statically) that would
> be loaded at runtime by TagLib, which would then query it to see which
> filetypes it handled by MIME type and/or filename and/or whatever other
> KDE mechanism, pardon my ignorance) and dispatch accordingly. Given that
> TagLib already builds separate libraries for these, it shouldn't be too
> hard to do.

I don't think that a plugin loading interface for TagLib generally makes sense 
as that's only useful in the simplist case of use as the format specific APIs 
wouldn't be available.

(Hint -- amaroK relying on FileRef's ability to resolve mime-types is 
specifically recommended against in the docs.)

I may reconsider this at some point as the classes become a little easier to 
plug stuff into and query, but that'd most likely be a 2.0 change (which 
doesn't have any concrete plans at the moment).

> It might make sense to incorporate certain changes, such as the
> UTF16-without-BOM stuff, into the mainline, since that at least should
> be free of copyright issues.

Yeah, I'm fine with adding that one.

Cheers,

-Scott

-- 
It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can 
fool enough of them to rule a large country. 
--Will Durant