Abstracting file access in TagLib

[William Pitcock]

Hi,

In audacious 1.3, we have a stream-based I/O system called NewVFS (it's 
exposed through the old vfs_* APIs in BMP, but that's irrelevant). At 
present, I see no easy way to abstract TagLib::File in a way that it can 
be treated by TagLib as compatible with TagLib::File (gcc simply chokes 
and says that there is an invalid attempt to use TagLib::File::File() when 
defining a new class that is virtual of TagLib::File).

Am I missing anything, or is this functionality simply unavailable? Is it 
possible to do this?

Searching around on Google, I found a port to Mono called TagLib#. I was 
hoping that it was simply a glue/wrapper code, and that it might have 
documentation on abstracting Taglib's I/O, but sadly, I discovered that it 
was a full port. TagLib# lets you do it by changing the creator of 
TagLib::FileRef or something (I didn't look very closely when I discovered 
it was 100% C#).

TagLib is a very good library for just getting into the file and getting 
at the metadata, and in general, we are satisfied with TagLib's 
performance. It would be a shame to have to find another reliable id3v[12] 
tagging library (libid3 is broken, writing unicode frames to id3v2.3 
structures, which is wrong as id3v2.3 is latin1 only). However, on the 
other hand, we do want to support our stream layer as much as possible in 
1.3.

Anyway, if anybody has any pointers on how to make Taglib::File do what we 
need, I'd definately appreciate it. I've tried to subclass like I 
mentioned earlier, but ran into a dead end.

   -- William