Please do not shoot: ASF read support

[Brian Nickel]

Hi Everybody,

> As far as I can see, there can be 5 arguments against the inclusion of
> ASF-WMA support in taglib:
> 1 - The maintainer does not want to have to maintain such an ugly
> format.

I would like to dispel myth 1. Having coded both an ASF and a MPEG4
reader/writer, I can honestly say that ASF is a much sounder format.

ASF took 1686 lines of code and 13 classes, while MPEG4 took 2520 lines
of code and 27 classes. In addition, the entire ASF format is well
documented as opposed to MPEG4 which doesn't include Apple's painfully
unintuitive boxes, the tagging format itself makes more sense, and I've
never had a nasty surprise from ASF like absolute data positions.

If ever there were a format to be accepted simply on the elegance and
ease of implementation, it should be ASF.

> 2 - The maintainer has some ethical or political problems with
> Microsoft.
> 3 - The origin of the code itself is doubtful.
> 4 - The code itself is not up to the standards of the project.

A fresh implementation could be written in 3 days or less reading
straight from the spec. Feel free to peak at my code (LGPL) too:
http://svn.myrealbox.com/viewcvs/trunk/taglib-sharp/src/TagLib/Asf/

> 5 - The functionality involved is patented.

Sincerely,
Brian Nickel
TagLib# Developer

PS. I still dislike Microsoft but man do they write good specs.