Hi all !

I just had a nice idea, which would make life just 10 times easier for all the people who use Musepack, Vorbis, AAC etc !

Problem:
A lot of software (RealJukebox, RealOne, Sony "Open"MG, etc..) that are used for NetMD/MP3/SDMI/Other portable devices and other purposes, ONLY accept *MP3* and *WAV* as input..

The current, simple, but CUMBERSOME !! solution:
So you either have to use/create high-bitrates mp3's for temporary use, or decode the files to WAV :-(

The improved solution:
Create a software that creates a virtual drives, on which EVERY mpc/ogg/aac/mp4 you have on your sub-directories, becomes WAV !

How to do this ?
Well, this is about the same principle as encryption software such as BestCrypt/Scramdisk/E4M/PGPDisk/Safeguard easy and others... Creating a virtual drive is not too difficult under windows, and we'd (generally speaking) perform "on-the-fly DECODING" instead of "on-the-fly DECRYPTION". Also, there would be no writing support to worry about.

We'd just have to simulate a drive that contains WAV. When a software accesses a data sector on the virtual drive, the corresponding compressed file is decompressed (from the encoded files on hard disk) and kept in a cache.. and the decoded, WAV data is returned to the bloatware, offending program :-)

Of course, each of the WAV file would be calculated (ie. decoded) on the 1st access.

This would have some REAL use, wouldn't it ?

Just imagine.. burning MPC files using NERO, without ANY temporary work !!! :-) :-) :-)

Of course, there would be a setting in the software, to choose the kind of WAV decoding (ie: album/file/no gain; noise shaping/none; etc).
What do you guys think about all this ?

cool idea, but who realizes it?

I don't know..

That could be the next audio-related open source project :-)

It should not be too difficult to create a virtual FAT32, non-fragmented file system. Isn't E4M (the transparent encryption program) open-source ? That would help one to create a virtual drive. Then comes a very simplified version of FAT32 filesystem, and last - audio decoding.

The audio decoding should be very simple, by taking all code from mppdec.exe and VorbisLib...

Tag support would be nonexistent, at start.

EDIT: btw, linkin, have you seen ? I joined HA precisely one day after you

Cool... Strange, this idea could be as well mine... Hope, that somebody will realize that! That would be really great!

If you're running a unix of any kind then this has already been done for you....

Samba File Extension Mapping VFS Module