portable storage

William J Poser wjposer at LDC.UPENN.EDU
Thu Dec 6 07:48:16 UTC 2007


I'd like to pick a nit regarding the advice: "Record in wav format".
There is no such thing as a wav AUDIO format. wav is a FILE format.
A wav file may contain any of dozens of audio formats, specified by
the 16 bit integer in bytes 20 and 21 of the file. What is probably
meant is to record "linear PCM" data, where PCM stands for
"Pulse Code Modulation". This is the fancy term for the usual
type of raw, uncompressed audio data.

What file type one stores this in doesn't matter that much. Wav is good
because it is widely used. snd/au and aiff are simpler file formats
that pretty much all software can handle. (wav files potentially contain
all sorts of junk, such as playlists, and are sufficiently complex,
in theory, that a lot of software only implements a subset of the spec
and/or gets it wrong).

Bill
 



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