767090 - Some audio formats that should probably be covered by filepicker.properties

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Stephan Sokolow]

While preparing Bug 767063, I noticed that the list of extensions for the sound format filter seemed a bit inconsistent. Here are some extensions I think you might want to add.

*.aiff and *.aifc

If you've already got *.aif in your filter, you'll at least want *.aiff too (like with *.jpg and *.jpeg) but it's probably also a good idea to add *.aifc since people do still sometimes use the correct extension for "AIFF with Compression".

*.spx and *.opus

Given that you seem to be collecting every other Ogg-based audio and video extension, probably a good idea to add the ones for Ogg Speex and Opus too.

*.m4r

If you're going to include *.m4a and *.m4b, then you should include *.m4r. (Ringtone. Basically a renamed *.m4a)

I'm assuming you don't want to include *.m4p (DRMed AAC) and I'm not sure about *.3gp since it doesn't seem to have separate extensions for video and audio-only files.

*.mod, *.stm, *.s3m, *.xm, *.it, *.mo3

If you're including waveform audio formats as niche as AIFF and Musepack and you're including MIDI, then you probably want to include the six Amiga Module formats that comprise the vast majority of tracked music.

Conceptually, they're essentially MIDI with embedded soundfonts and they've got a huge cult following.

*.mpp and *.mp+

You've already got *.mpc and these are alternate extensions for the same format.

*.shn, *.wv, *.ape, *.tta

You've already got Musepack (*.mpc) in your list and I see Shorten (*.shn) at least an order of magnitude more in the wild and WavPack (*.wv) and Monkey's Audio Codec (*.ape) about the same.

True Audio (TTA) doesn't seem to get much use in the western world, but the degree of support it enjoys, both in hardware and software (eg. nearly 18 apps listed as supporting on Wikipedia alone, apparently including native support in Windows Media Player 11 and 12, several Chinese and Russian hardware devices, Rockbox, etc.) seems to justify including it on the list. (It seems to be more widely supported than Musepack, and you already include that)

*.mp1 and *.mp2

I still run into these every now and then and most things which decode MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3) will also work with Layer 1 or Layer 2. Probably a good idea to include them in the filter.

*.au

If you're including AIFF and what I assume to be MacOS SND and, in the process, allowing one of the extensions that Sun/NeXT AU/SND uses, you might as well include the other.

It's sort of like the *.bmp of Unix audio. There's almost always something better for the job, but you never know when you'll run into one.

*.voc

I'm not sure if you want this one, but I though I'd mention Creative Labs's VOC format for nostalgia's sake, since everyone had at least one of them in the DOS days and various applications still support it automatically by using libsndfile to handle things like *.aif, *.iff, *.wav, *.au, and the Sun/NeXT version of *.snd.