m4a tagging support?

[Michael]

Jochen Issing wrote:
> [..]
>
> The hacks:
> * take the whole moov-box, replace it with a free box and place it afterwards 
> the mdat box. This avoids recalculation of any offsets, though it makes the 
> structure of the mp4 file slightly worse. Anyway, the file format is still 
> conformant, but one wastes the size of a whole moov box.
>
> [..]
>   
> Cheers,
>
> jochen
>   

Hi Jochen,

First of all, thanks for all your hard work so far, I really appreciate it.

I'd just like to warn you about a problem that might arise using above 
hack. Placing the moov after the mdat is strictly speaking not 
'illegal', it is very unwise though. Some hardware players will only 
play when moov precedes mdat, not sure of any software players but it is 
likely.

A bigger problem with this box order is streaming and sharing these 
files over LAN's. Sharing your personal music library across LAN's is 
increasingly popular. The same goes for streaming an audio file to a 
device that is (or connects to) a regular Hi-Fi set. Apple Airtunes is a 
very popular implementation of this and certainly not the only one. In 
these situations the receiving end expects the metadata to arrive first 
in the stream because it needs it to know what kind of audio data will 
be following.

iTunes for instance will play files with this reverse order perfectly 
until someone wants to hear them remote or wants to stream it to an 
Airtunes device, then these tracks will simply not play.

For this reason both the Nero encoder and Foobar2000 recently changed 
their box order to overcome this problem, it would suit taglib if it 
chose the most compatible path as well.

Regards,
Michael