Hi,

i am a member of the matroska team ( http://www.matroska.org ), just an offer from our side :

If you ever thought about adding mka support to amaroK and need help for this, give us a shout. You will usually find us on irc.corecodec.org #matroska .

Both Gstreamer and Xine do have a matroska parser, and a mka file ( matroska audio ) has the same basic layout as a mkv ( matroska video ) file, and that includes advanced features like

- menues
- chapters
- super chapters
- tags

etc. matroska can currently support the following audio compression standards :

PCM
MP2
MP3
AC3
AAC
Vorbis
FLAC
DTS
Wavpack4
TTA
RALF
ATRAC
RealAudio


as well as all audio compression formats where ACM codecs exist ( M$ Video for Windows Audio Codec Manager ).

I dont own a Linux box myself, but we do have a Linux fraction in our core development team and they can certainly report about the status in both Xine and Gstreamer, with respect to what audio formats should be supported already. In any case, the first 8 should be well supported in both of them.

matroska has gained some attention in audio circles like at hydrogenaudio.org, because it offers easy possibility to store a complete album in a single mka file, with chapters marking each song, and including attachements for covers, lyrics, etc.

Regards

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org

chris AT matroska DOT org

Do you mean amaroK should be able to do anything outside of straight playing matroska? This would work already (I assume), thanks to xine and gstreamer. I suppose if there are multiple audio tracks, there would be no way to select the second one. Though since amaroK isn\'t a video player there wouldn\'t be a point really... right?

For proper support of MKA files containing one complete album, it would be nice if amaroK would offer a interface to read matroska chapters, as in those files every song of the album is a chapter, while the complete album is a single track. This is not difficult at all, you can use our libs to read those chapter entries, as well as tracknames, before playing the file.

In your playlist you could display every chapter entry as a song of its own, so people can access the songs directly.

Another thing to do then is support for our tagging system, so people could access the tags for each album or each song, and maybe even for writing.

Super chapters are a bit more difficult to support, they will allow to use different audio compression for each song of an album, but still having one single file for it. But this is not a real problem, as there are currently no tools creating super chapters for audio only files.

As our libs are L-GPL and pretty well documented, i cant see this would take too long. Again the offer, if you need help for that, ping us. We also have a couple of demo files on bittorrent, just email me for them if you care.

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org