[Olympus developers 303]: Re: raw file vs wav file, is there a good reason?

[Alex Rudnicky]

The reasons were not very good ones:

1) at the time everything we were doing in interactive systems was 8kHz,
so this was "understood" to be the format. (Or, you just "knew" what
your data were.)

2) there was no really universally-accepted file format in ASR (except
maybe for .sph).

3) to do it correctly, at the end of the recording you needed to fseek
to the top of the file and put in the right numbers in the header (ie
length). This was thought to impact speed (maybe a dubious proposition).

4) various other resource-constraint related reasons, none of which I
believe are still operative.

The right thing to do at this time would be to write a standard RIFF
header (.wav). This would make the files readers by pretty much all
tools out there; also, the format is flexible enough so that specialized
information can easily be included in a data block without breaking
anything.

Alex



-----Original Message-----
From: olympus-developers-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
[mailto:olympus-developers-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of
Gabriel Parent
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 5:02 PM
To: olympus-developers at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: [Olympus developers 302]: raw file vs wav file,is there a good
reason?

All,

what was the initial reason for writing the utterance and system audio 
file as raw file versus wav file. Is the main reason to save disk space?

Gabriel