Both AIFF and WAV have always been able to support floating-point formats. CDP
has been doing this for years (We also 'made it so').In my copy of the AIFF
documentation V1.2, it is stated sxplicitly that the samplesize can be anything
from 1 to 32, so the only ambiguity is whether that could be a 32bit int - what
are people doing on the Mac these days?. With WAV, Microsoft recently published
a format tag for float soundfiles (WAVE_FORMAT_IEEE_FLOAT = 3), which can
officially be 32bit floats, or even 64bit doubles. Csound now includes support
for this. Whether anyone can play these is a moot point. Cool Edit Pro will
record and play the WAV 32bit float format ('type 3'), as, now, will CDP (wrote
'record' last week!). However, Microsoft's new all-singing version of Media
Player does not accept a type-3 file (until I or somebody writes an ActiveMovie
conversion filter)!


Of course the new kid on the block is CNMAT's SDIF format ( go to
http://cnmat.CNMAT.Berkeley.EDU/SDIF/  ), which I started looking at a while
back, but got distracted with other things. IRCAM are supporting this initiative
themselves. One snappy thing about this format is that everything is aligned on
64bit boundaries.


Richard Dobson

Matt J. Ingalls wrote:
> 
> the only benefit i can see is IRCAM *supports* floating point..
> AIFF doesnt - AIFC does (but is not "official" - Madole/Erbe
> just "made it so") - and im not sure what the story is behind WAV floats
> (???)
> 
> but at least on the mac end, the only apps i know of that use IRCAM are
> file converter ones...
> 

 > has been doing this for years (We also 'made it so').In my copy of the
AIFF
>  documentation V1.2, it is stated sxplicitly that the samplesize can be
anything
> from 1 to 32, so the only ambiguity is whether that could be a 32bit int - what
> are people doing on the Mac these days?. With WAV, Microsoft recently published

	my understanding was that AIFF didnt contain a "MaxValue" chunk, 
and although this was not in AIFC either - AIFC was more "openended" where
Dave could create a one... Is the WAV implementation the same?

	i havent looked on the other platforms, but on the Mac port we
have a format-type flag that will generate sound in floats then
automatically normalize to shorts.  is this on other platforms? and if
not, - it would be easy enough to include in the source if people wanted
it...
matt