[LAU] RF64 file format and commercial software

[fons at kokkinizita.net]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 03:56:36PM +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:

> fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
> 
> > I'm not really in love with RF64. For my own multichannel use I've
> > standardized on CAF - clean format, no 4GB problems, and all apps
> > using your library can read it.
> 
> Thats an interesting choice.
> 
> The main thing with CAF is that it is by default a format optimised
> for big endian systems (it was developed on PowerPC). All the chunk
> length fields are stored big endian and by default things like 16
> bit PCM data is stored big endian.
> ...

I'm well aware of this. For the headers the byte-swapping overhead is
really without consequence, the format allows PCM data to be written
with either endianness, and libsndfile makes this possible in the way
you describe. So all is well !

Another feature I like is that provided the headers are flushed to
disk and the data length set to -1 you get a valid file even if
it is was not closed cleanly, e.g. as a result of a power failure
or software crash. Does libsndfile do the right things to support
this ?

Ciao,

-- 
FA

There are three of them, and Alleline.