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Update wavinfo.7
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iluvcapra authored Nov 8, 2023
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43 changes: 42 additions & 1 deletion data/share/man/man7/wavinfo.7
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -79,7 +79,9 @@ of chunks, and should accept any file as long as the obligatory
and
.I data
chunks
are present. It's not unheard-of to see a naive implementor expect
are present.
.PP
It's not unheard-of to see a naive implementor expect
.B only
these chunks, in this order, and to hard-code the offsets of the short
.I fmt
Expand All @@ -90,6 +92,45 @@ checked when evaluating a new tool, just to make sure the developer
didn't do this. Many coding examples and WAVE file explainers from the
90s and early aughts give the basic layout of a WAVE file and naive devs
go along with it.
.SS Encoding and Decoding Text Metadata
.PP
Modern metadata systems, anything developed since the late aughts, will
defer encoding to an XML parser so when dealing with
.I ixml
or
.I axml
so a client can mostly ignore this problem.
.PP
The most established metadata systems are older than this though, and
so the entire weight of text encoding history falls upon the client.
.PP
The original WAVE specification, a part of the Microsoft/IBM Multimedia
interface of 1991, was written at a time when Windows was an ascendant
and soon-to-be dominant desktop environment. Audio files were almost
never shared via LANs or the Internet or any other way.
When audio files were shared, among the miniscule number of people
who did this, it was via BBS or usenet. Users at this time may have
ripped them from CDs, but the cost of hard drives and low quality of
compressed formats at the time made this little more than a curiosity.
There was no
.I CDBaby or
.I CDDB
to download and populate metadata from at this time.
.PP
So, the
.I INFO
and
.I cue
metadata systems, which are by far the most prevalent and supported,
were published two years before the so-called "Endless September" of
1993 when the Internet became mainstream, when Unicode was still a
twinkle in the eye, and two years before Ariana Grande was born.
.PP
The safest assumption, and the mandate of the Microsoft, is that all
text metadata, by default, be encoded in Windows codepage 819,
a.k.a. ISO Latin alphabet 1, or ISO 8859-1. This covers most Western
European scripts but excludes all of Asia, Russia and most of the European
Near East, the Middle East.
.SH CHUNK MENAGERIE
A list of chunks that you may find in a wave file from our experience.
.SS Essential WAV Chunks
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