On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 05:35:11PM -0000, Walter Knapp wrote:
> .... .wav differs in that windows uses the
> reverse bit order of everybody else. If you are moving audio back and
> forth between MD, computer and audio CD, the AIFF format will have less
> steps.
There is rather confused. AIFF format specifies a big-endian *byte*
order. WAV files are almost all in little-endian byte-order. The WAV
format theoretically allows big-endian byte-order but its little used
and presumably not supported by most software.
Some computers (CPUs) use a little-endian byte-order to store integers
in memory, some use a big-endian byte-order.
I don't know how the pits are laid out on a CD but some CD writers
want data in a little-endian byte-order and some big-endian.
Byte-swapping is a trivial operation so none of this matters unless you
are a software developer. It won't affect performance. There is no
right or wrong order and its not a reason to prefer a particular sound
file format.
> Though they are going
> against unix too, as AIFF is it's native format once you get past the
> primitive .au format.
There isn't a native format for Unix - a wide variety of formats get used
and there are tools (e.g sox) and libraries (e.g. sndfile) which handle
WAV, AIFF and many other sound file formats. Particular manufacturers
may have provided software focused on one format, e.g. Sun and .au.
Andrew Taylor
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