Re: [LAU] Audacity strange behavior

Folderol wrote: Visual inspection is not really up the the task :-). I've got a little curses hexdump utility that I use for this kind of comparison: http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/Tools/hv.html which shows something like this for "hv Test[234].wav": 00000000: 52 49 46 46 A8 02 49 00 57 41 56 45 66 6D 74 20 RIFF..I. WAVEfmt 52 49 46 46 A8 02 49 00 57 41 56 45 66 6D 74 20 RIFF..I. WAVEfmt 52 49 46 46 A8 02 49 00 57 41 56 45 66 6D 74 20 RIFF..I. WAVEfmt 00000010: 10 00 00 00 01 00 02 00 44 AC 00 00 10 B1 02 00 ........ D....... 10 00 00 00 01 00 02 00 44 AC 00 00 10 B1 02 00 ........ D....... 10 00 00 00 01 00 02 00 44 AC 00 00 10 B1 02 00 ........ D....... 00000020: 04 00 10 00 64 61 74 61 84 02 49 00 00 00 02 00 ....data ..I..... 04 00 10 00 64 61 74 61 84 02 49 00 FE FF 02 00 ....data ..I..... 04 00 10 00 64 61 74 61 84 02 49 00 01 00 FF FF ....data ..I..... 00000030: FC FF 05 00 FB FF 02 00 01 00 FE FF 02 00 FE FF ........ ........ FD FF 03 00 FD FF 01 00 02 00 FC FF 05 00 FA FF ........ ........ 00 00 00 00 00 00 FF FF 02 00 FE FF 02 00 FD FF ........ ........ The differences are small, about 2 least significant bits, which suggests that the audio has been dithered. My guess is that Audacity has a default internal format of normalized floats (ie range [-1.0, 1.0]) and that by default it dithers when saving internal floating point data to a 16 bit WAV files. In general, when converting from float to 16 bit int, dither should be applied. However, one case where it makes sense not to dither is when you load 16 bit integer audio data into a float internal format and then save it back to a 16 bit integer format. In other words, the int16_t -> float -> int16_t chain should be lossless. If you are interested in lossless conversion from integer format to integer format, you should try sndfile-convert which (obviously) handles all the formats supported by libsndfile. The sndfile-convert program by default does all conversions in 32 bit integer format (hence int16_t -> int16_t is lossless) and only uses floating point if either the source or destination format is float. HTH, Erik -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo ----------------------------------------------------------------- "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." -- Doug Gwyn