I read the header file, convert it to hex and comment it here http://pastebin.com/YBQTieNZ The comments came from reading http://www-mmsp.ece.mcgill.ca/Documents/AudioFormats/WAVE/WAVE.html After reading your replies and the page I understood a little better about the problem. Im curious, why does wave format need to store the chunk size, does it have any advantages? In what way does meta data would be useful? Does it keep the samplerate, and all the technical stuff, or is it to keep other kinds of information? Wow, I'm very grateful for you spending your time helping me and answering my questions. Thank you very much. Could you elaborate in what way does not being able to store meta data a feature? Is meta data harmful or bring any trouble? I think that .au also has a very simple header. Do I need to add a .au header? Can sox add the header automatically? What is a good way to create it manually? The thing that confuses me is the endianness of the data. Wave is little endian, while this page http://www-mmsp.ece.mcgill.ca/Documents/AudioFormats/AU/AU.html says that AU is big-endian, or is it just the header? Altough on the bottom of the page it says that the data is stored in little endian. So, is it enough to copy the data using dd (minus the header), and add a header file manually? I tried splitting the file and reading it using sox and it says it can't find Sun/NeXT/DEC identifier. I guess I should add a header myself?