Hi all,

This is my first post here, though I read almost the whole HA website I hope I won't make a duplicated stupid question

I have a heterogeneous audio file list that I want to mux into a single mastroka file. By heterogeneous I mean for example Mp3s + Oggs + Flacs, intermixed. I should precise that every individual file contain several songs (live recording mainly). What I want to do is to have a mkv file that hold all these files (predefined order) and be able to seek each sub song transparently through my favorite audio player.

When I use mkvmerge to mux my files, It happens that there are all synchronized to the virtual 0-time, as if I had a videoless movie with multitrack audio. I can't find any way to have them in sequential order, one track after each other. To simplify, I tried to zip them all, and wrap then into mkv with a cue-sheet... this works, except that small garbage at the end of each track which is normal since I concatenate different track. It is dirty BUT it works more or less (I did that only with mp3s not heterogeneous format).

My questions are, is zipping a clean way for concatenate heterogeneous audio format? Have I missed something or muxing physically independent audio streams into matroska will always result in parallel multitrack audio output?

Actually I motivate this by the fact that I want to be able to recover those track perfectly so that a recompression is not possible. I neither want to go for lossless, since I want to keep the good compression ratio.

Any ideas is welcome...

You cannot use different (audio) codecs for different parts of a single track. I don't really know a container that would let you do that (maybe Quicktime, I'm not certain). You cannot use mkvmerge to concatenate several files into a single track either.

With full menu/control tracks support in the Matroska something like this might be possible, but not at the moment.

Thank you mosu for your fast reply.

You need the long awaited control tracks. This feature will allow you to define various orders in which the songs should be played, from each track. You can define as many control tracks as you want, even for the same file and the tracks / songs in this file, and the player will load the control track ( its like a playlist ) and play them accordingly.

The specs are made, but there is no muxer to make them, nor any player supporting this yet. Haali is working on it for his new DShow splitter, and he has plans to realize a control track feature in it, lets see what the results are.

Christian
matroska project admin

Also, Matroska is not meant to replace a real file-system (yet).

We already thought about different codecs as you would like, but supporting this requires a lot of work. And so control track should be used to hide this complexity. But that will come later

thx for the replies.

Actually I'm getting the big picture. But I did some experiences with zipping homogeneous and heterogeneous files, so as to be considered as one compact track wrt. mkvmerge. Tell if I'm wrong but when zipped, mkvmerge analyse the file as a whole and thus consider only the header of the first one? That would explain why zipped Mp3s are almost perfectly muxed into an mka (mkvmerge consider the following headers as audio data and consider them as garbage), while zipping a mp3 followed by an ogg completely throw away the ogg (mkvmerge consider it as mp3 data and thus don't recognize it i.e skip that portion of the zip file).

I got my answer, zipping multiple files is DIRTY. It may appear to work with files encoded with the same encoder, but actually it is more hacking the zip feature of mkvmerge. It is a lot clearer to me now.

What is the zip feature used for then?