collecting_society

Yes it is capable to host mulitchannel audio.

There is a flac encoder option: --keep-foreign-metadata

"If encoding, save WAVE, Wave64, RF64, or AIFF non-audio chunks in FLAC metadata. If decoding, restore any saved non-audio chunks from FLAC metadata when writing the decoded file. Foreign metadata cannot be transcoded, e.g. WAVE chunks saved in a FLAC file cannot be restored when decoding to AIFF. Input and output must be regular files (not stdin or stdout)."

So AIFF should be excluded, if we decide to do this -- at least do a test-decode and compare it binary to the original, when in doubt.

This seems to be much more demanding in terms of computing power than preview creation. So this should be a second consideration.

The currently allowed file formats are:

• Wav [.wav, .wave]
• Au [.au, .snd]
• Flac [.flac]
• Monkeys Audio [.ape]

Aiff is excluded right now anyways, because there's no strict policy for the file extension:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Interchange_File_Format:

"For the compressed variants it is supposed to be .aifc, but .aiff or .aif are accepted as well by audio applications supporting the format."

Concerning the computing power: we should provide an estimate and include Frank for the decision.