Townshend Computer Tools DAT-Link - Appendix B File Formats; B.1 Audio Data File Formats

App endix B
File Formats
B.1 Audio Data File Formats
The following sections describe the audio data le formats used by the naplay and
narecord programs. Note that information stored in these le formats may be
used for some of the default settings of the naplay program, such as sampling rate.
Format names are case-insensitive and may be abbreviated to a minimal length
non-ambiguous string. For playback, if a format is not specied on the command
line, then various heuristics will b e used to try to deduce the typ e of the le.
The narecord and naplay programs also have options that allow the data encoding
and precision to b e sp ecied, overriding the default for the particular le format.
B.1.1 Raw
The raw format consists of the audio data stored as a stream of 16 bit signed integers
using twos-complement encoding. The data is stored with the most signicantbyte
of eachinteger rst, regardless of the byte-ordering of the host computer. If stereo
data is stored in the le, then the left and rightchannels are intersp ersed starting
with the left channel. This format has no header and contains no information other
than the audio data. Dierent data enco dings and precisions can be obtained using
the -e and -p options to narecord or naplay .
B.1.2 Swap
This is identical to the raw format except that the byte-ordering of the integers is
reversed. Each 16 bit integer is stored with the least signicant byte rst. This
byte-ordering is most often found on DEC computers.