portable storage

[Aidan Wilson]

Sure, but I was trying not to needlessly complicate matters. The point 
is to use a format that a) is uncompressed, and b) stands a high chance 
of being readable x number of years into the future. As far as I'm 
aware, you cannot operate raw pcm files on a computer; they have to be 
embedded inside some file format with a necessary header, be it wav, au 
or aiff.
Wav is proprietary right? Owned by IBM? Is there an open-source equivalent?

William J Poser wrote:
> 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
>  
>   

-- 
Aidan Wilson

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