[linux-audio-user] Re: Converting IEEE FLOAT WAV's to ... anything? - Linux-audio-user

11 Feb 2007

Ken Restivo:
...
 > The only tool I've found so for that can
handle IEEE FLOAT WAV's is
> oggenc. Yay Vorbis. But, the FLAC tools, even though they're from the
> same developers as Ogg Vorbis, dies horribly, with ERROR: unsupported
> compression type 3 
I think IEEE floats can't be used in flac, because its a lossless
compressor and that it gurantees not to alter the data. Floats are
probably too hard (probably impossible?) to handle to sattisfy
requirements.
...
 >
> ----------------------------------------
> Sample Rate : 48000
> Frames      : 14277625
> Channels    : 2
> Format      : 0x00010006
> Sections    : 1
> Seekable    : TRUE
> Duration    : 00:04:57.450
> Signal Max  : 0.724668 (-2.80 dB)
>
> This is the format that jack_capture produces. It supposedly has 
I chose this format as default because its the most common one for audio
processing.
...
 > options to save in other bit-depths, which I
tried, but they didn't
> seem to do anything.
> 
Works here:
kjetil@ttleush ~ $ jack_capture -b 16
Recording to "jack_capture_03.wav". Press <Return> or <Ctrl-C> to
stop it.
Please wait while writing all data to disk. (shouldn't take long)
disk thread finished
connection thread finished
kjetil@ttleush ~ $ sfinfo jack_capture_03.wav
File Name      jack_capture_03.wav
File Format    Microsoft RIFF WAVE Format (wave)
Data Format    16-bit integer (2's complement, little endian)
Audio Data     278528 bytes begins at offset 44 (2c hex)
                2 channels, 69632 frames
Sampling Rate  44100.00 Hz
Duration       1.579 seconds
...
   Granted, I can
open these files in Audacity or Rezound or Sweep, and with the GUI convert the file to
just about anything. However, I dislike GUI's, and I'd like to be able to do this
with the commandline tools. Opening 20 WAV files and click-clacking around on menu options
is anathaema: the whole process wants to be a 1-liner bash script really.

 OK after a bit more experimentation, I solved my own problem.
 This is for converting from 32-bit 48000 to redbook CD format:
        sox something-32bit.wav  -t wav -w -r 44100 something-cd.wav resample -ql

You might want to be careful with sox's resampling... You probably want to
listen to the results, but sndfile-resample or resample are probably
safer program to use instead.
...
  And, for making FLAC's:
        sox something-32bit.wav  -w -t wav - | flac - > something.flac

jack_capture actually supports flac very conveniently:
"$jack_capture -f flac"
...
  A similar thing works for making mp3's; I just
pipe it to lame instead of to flac. Et voila.

I have a script called makemp3.sh that looks like this:
#!/bin/sh
sndfile-convert -pcm32 $1.wav $1o.wav
lame $1o.wav
mv $1o.wav.mp3 $1.mp3
rm $1o.wav