On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 03:51:03AM -0000, John Lundsten wrote: > Well as approx 98% of computers are PC's, whatever the merits > of CAF (beyond ticking the 'box' this is different to what is > available on a PC) it would be totally unsuitable to the OP. > > And yes for sure the RIFF Wav (with Wav extensible) has the > cool chan mapping features CAF has, and very much as on a Mac, > hardly anyone has bothered to implement it. > > IMO if one wants to store so called linear PCM, use WAV. All > other formats offer less & only exist for (a) backward compatibility > for which I have no problem or (b) to screw the customer, which > I find obnoxious.
This is stretching the actual facts a bit too much to be left unchallenged. In fact, WAV is the one that exists for backwards compatibility only. The WAV format was compromised in its early years by mutually incompatible 'extensions', created by various software houses mainly for multichannel (> 2 channels), but also for plain mono and stereo. There are even today lots of those around. Microsoft was partly to blame for this by leaving some parts of the spec rather ambiguous. The result was chaos. Anyway, MS has officially deprecated multichannel WAV for ages now, and the WAVEX format was created to clean up the mess. Everything having more than 2 channels can't be WAV, it must be WAVEX. This has the same filename extension so you wouldn't normally notice. Mono or stereo WAV files are still accepted by official MS applications for the simple reason that there are so many of those around. At the moment, CAF is the only format I know of that doesn't drag a history of outdated junk behind it, that is 64-bit safe (WAV and WAVEX are not), and future-proof. Ciao, -- FA Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal, die Sonne scheint - ein Glitzerstrahl. _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
