im assuming judy it talking about csound's sndinfo.

anybody familiar with bwf files?

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Judy Klein 
> Date: January 4, 2005 8:58:45 PM PST
> To: Matt Ingalls 
> Subject: sndinfo
>
>
>
> Hi Matt,
>
> A question for you.   I'd rather be asking about a c-sound related 
> issue, something even somewhat related to computer music composition, 
> but unfortunately, this is not the case.
>
> For New York Public Library for the Performing Arts,  I'm working on 
> an index for some electroacoustic music archives containing hundreds 
> of soundfiles (digital preservation copies of analog tapes).    We 
> (the audio engineers and I) are running unix programs such as sndinfo 
> and sfprint to get certain metadata, such as file type, number of 
> sample frames, exact duration, header size, audio data size.      
> sndinfo is the only program I have found  which shows the audio data 
> size and the header size of the soundfiles.
>
> The NYPL servers and well, the whole NYPL system is Windows-based.  
> So, even though I and all the sound engineers are using Macs, we are 
> saving all soundfiles in wav format.  Currently, the ''wav world'' is 
> changing from standard wav to broadcast wav (bwf).  ProTools, for 
> example, even on the Mac, when saving files as wav ones, saves them as 
> bwf ones.   The unix version of sndinfo can't handle a bwf file at 
> all.  It just hangs.
>
> (I thought that the extra chunk (bext) wasn't fooling your csound app, 
> and that your app was able to by-pass the chunk and read the 
> soundfile.  I tried this some time ago.  But when I tried to ask your 
> app to load a bwf file this eve, it hung, too.  So, maybe my memory 
> was wrong.)
>
> I'd like to know if you think someone would be willing to update the 
> sndinfo program to be able to capture the metadata for bwf soundfiles 
> in the same way it does for other soundfiles.  To have the metadata 
> contained in the bext chunk would be an extra treat, but just getting 
> the audio data size, header size, etc, would suffice.
>
> Thanks.   Hope you are fine, and I wish you a happy new year.
>
> -Judy Klein
>
>
>