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

[Kjetil S. Matheussen]

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 at 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 at 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