Free streamable software for linux

MyMP3db will display your MP3 collection as a searchable, browsable, streamable Web site. You can use it to stream your music from anywhere to any Icecast compatible MP3 player, and without installing anything.
It is similar to Apache::MP3, but improved. It features a rich, yet easy to navigate interface. You can quickly search across artists, albums, and song titles with autocompletion. Artists and albums can be browsed. Cover art images for each album are supported.
MyMP3db project automatically tracks both your favorite and ignored songs. There is a real-time display of the songs youre listening to.
Main features:
- Stream songs to any Icecast compatible MP3 player
- Feature rich yet easy to navigate interface
- Quick search across artists, albums and song titles with autocomplete.
- Browse through artists and albums.
- View details on an album and all the songs in it.
- Supports coverart images for each album.
- An admin page for configuring playlist formatting.
- Build a custom playlist from any items you like. Individual songs or entire artists libraries.
- Tracks your favorite and ignored songs alike.
- Real-time history display of the songs youre listening to

Image::ExifTool::MIE is a Perl module to read/write MIE meta information.

Features

Below is very subjective score card comparing the features of a number of common file and meta information formats, and comparing them to MIE. The following features are rated for each format with a score of 0 to 10:

1) Extensible (can incorporate user-defined information).
2) Meaningful tag IDs (hint to meaning of unknown information).
3) Sequential read/write ability (streamable).
4) Hierarchical information structure.
5) Easy to implement reader/writer/editor.
6) Order of information well defined.
7) Large data lengths supported: >64kB (+5) and >4GB (+5).
8) Localized text strings.
9) Multiple documents in a single file.
10) Compact format doesnt squander disk space or bandwidth.
11) Compressed meta information supported.
12) Relocatable data elements (ie. no fixed offsets).
13) Binary meta information (+7) with variable byte order (+3).
14) Mandatory tags not required (an unecessary complication).
15) Append information to end of file without editing.

Feature number Total
Format 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Score
------ --------------------------------------------- -----
MIE 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 150
PDF 10 10 0 10 0 0 10 0 10 10 10 0 7 10 10 97
PNG 10 10 10 0 8 0 5 10 0 10 10 10 0 10 0 93
XMP 10 10 10 10 2 0 10 10 10 0 0 10 0 10 0 92
AIFF 0 5 10 10 10 0 5 0 0 10 0 10 7 10 0 77
RIFF 0 5 10 10 10 0 5 0 0 10 0 10 7 10 0 77
JPEG 10 0 10 0 10 0 0 0 0 10 0 10 7 10 0 67
EPS 10 10 10 0 0 0 10 0 10 0 0 5 0 10 0 65
CIFF 0 0 0 10 10 0 5 0 0 10 0 10 10 10 0 65
TIFF 0 0 0 10 5 10 5 0 10 10 0 0 10 0 0 60
EXIF 0 0 0 10 5 10 0 0 0 10 0 0 10 0 0 45
IPTC 0 0 10 0 8 0 0 0 0 10 0 10 7 0 0 45

By design, MIE ranks highest by a significant margin. Other formats with reasonable scores are PDF, PNG and XMP, but each has significant weak points. What may be surprising is that TIFF, EXIF and IPTC rank so low.

As well as scoring high in all these features, the MIE format has the unique ability to encapsulate any other type of file, and provides a non-invasive method of adding meta information to a file. The meta information is logically separated from the original file data, which is extremely important because meta information is routinely lost when files are edited.

Also, the MIE format supports multiple files by simple concatenation, enabling all kinds of wonderful features such as linear databas

OptimFROG is a lossless audio compression program. OptimFROG project main goal is to reduce at maximum the size of audio files, while premitting bit identical restoration for all input. It is similar with the ZIP compression, but it is highly specialized to compress audio data.
OptimFROG obtains asymptotically the best lossless audio compression ratios. It has Windows and Linux versions, fully featured input plug-ins for the foobar2000, Winamp2, Winamp3, dBpowerAMP, XMPlay and XMMS audio players (with bitstream error resilience, ID3v1.1 and APEv2 read tagging support), optimal support for all integer PCM wave formats up to 32 bits and an extensible streamable (error tolerant) compressed format. It is also fast, the default mode encodes CD quality audio data at 12.4x real-time and decodes at 17.4x real-time on AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (the fastest mode encodes at 28.1x real-time and decodes at 24.7x real-time).
The compression ratios which can obtained with OptimFROG are generally ranging from 25% (silent classical music) to 70% (loud rock music) of the original audio file size. This is less compared with around 13% obtained with high quality MP3 files (~176 kb), but you have the great advantage of archiving and listening at perfect copies of your original music.
OptimFROG uses a new audio compression technology, the generalized stereo decorrelation concept (together with the optimal predictor), which was first introduced with OptimFROG 4.0b in December 2001. At the time of its introduction, the new technology yielded significant better (~1.5%) compression than existing state of the art lossless audio compressors.
Main features:
- asymptotically the best lossless audio compression ratios
- optimal support for all integer PCM wave formats up to 32 bits
- fully featured foobar2000, dBpowerAMP, Winamp2, Winamp3, XMPlay, and XMMS input plug-ins for playback
- fast operation, default mode encodes CD quality audio data at 12.4x real-time and decodes at 17.4x real-time on AMD Athlon XP 1800+
- Win32 and Linux command line versions
- simple to use, but powerful Windows GUI front-end, Kermit (made by Speek)
- extensible, streamable compressed format, tagging compatible
- optimize option, further improving compression at no decoding cost
- backward compatible with version 4.2x (decode only)
- 64 bits large file support under Win32
- full pipe support for encoding and decoding
- full raw file support
- quick verify compressed file integrity function
- compatible with Exact Audio Copy, with ID3v1.1 tagging
- extensible command line format
- multiple file processing on the same command line, with wildcards
- option to store MD5 of raw PCM input data and function to check it
- option to delete source file after successful operation
- option to copy source file time stamp to destination file
- bitstream error resilience and transparent real-time recovery
- fast seek with intelligent caching for plug-ins
- ID3v1.1 and APEv2 read tagging support for plug-ins
- streaming support (playing HTTP streams) for foobar2000 plug-in
- Replay Gain compatible plug-ins for foobar2000 and Winamp3
- fully featured SDK for using compressed files in any application

FLAC is Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.
This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.
FLAC is freely available and supported on most operating systems, including Windows, "unix" (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. There are build systems for autotools, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.
The FLAC project consists of:
the stream format
reference encoders and decoders in library form
flac, a command-line program to encode and decode FLAC files
metaflac, a command-line metadata editor for FLAC files
input plugins for various music players
When we say that FLAC is "Free" it means more than just that it is available at no cost. It means that the specification of the format is fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance), and that neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any known patent. It also means that all the source code is available under open-source licenses. It is the first truly open and free lossless audio format.
Main features:
- Lossless: The encoding of audio (PCM) data incurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical to what went into the encoder. Each frame contains a 16-bit CRC of the frame data for detecting transmission errors. The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.
- Fast: FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardware.
- Hardware support: Because of FLACs free reference implementation and low decoding complexity, FLAC is currently the only lossless codec that has any kind of hardware support.
- Streamable: Each FLAC frame contains enough data to decode that frame. FLAC does not even rely on previous or following frames. FLAC uses sync codes and CRCs (similar to MPEG and other formats), which, along with framing, allow decoders to pick up in the middle of a stream with a minimum of delay.
- Seekable: FLAC supports fast sample-accurate seeking. Not only is this useful for playback, it makes FLAC files suitable for use in editing applications.
- Flexible metadata: New metadata blocks can be defined and implemented in future versions of FLAC without breaking older streams or decoders. Currently there are metadata types for tags, cue sheets, and seek tables. Applications can write their own APPLICATION metadata once they register an ID
- Suitable for archiving: FLAC is an open format, and there is no generation loss if you need to convert your data to another format in the future. In addition to the frame CRCs and MD5 signature, flac has a verify option that decodes the encoded stream in parallel with the encoding process and compares the result to the original, aborting with an error if there is a mismatch.
- Convenient CD archiving: FLAC has a "cue sheet" metadata block for storing a CD table of contents and all track and index points. For instance, you can rip a CD to a single file, then import the CDs extracted cue sheet while encoding to yield a single file representation of the entire CD. If your original CD is damaged, the cue sheet can be exported later in order to burn an exact copy.
- Error resistant: Because of FLACs framing, stream errors limit the damage to the frame in which the error occurred, typically a small fraction of a second worth of data. Contrast this with some other lossless codecs, in which a single error destroys the remainder of the stream.
What FLAC is not:
- Lossy. FLAC is intended for lossless compression only, as there are many good lossy formats already, such as Vorbis, MPC, and MP3 (see LAME for an excellent open-source implementation).
- SDMI compliant, et cetera. There is no intention to support any methods of copy protection, which are, for all practical purposes, a complete waste of bits. (Another way to look at it is that since copy protection is futile, it really carries no information, so you might say FLAC already losslessly compresses all possible copy protection information down to zero bits!) Of course, we cant stop what some misguided person does with proprietary metadata blocks, but then again, non-proprietary decoders will skip them anyway.