Norbert Hahn wrote:
wrote:
I have some WAV recordings that I would like to trim to
remove extra
material
at the beginning/end. I am looking for a wav file editor
that will
let me do
simple edits like this, without changing the remaining
audio.
Most audio editors should allow to select a portion of the
file and
offer Save Highlighted Part.
From cursory examination of the .WAV file format, I
would have
thought
this was simple to do. Yet the programs I have tried so
far
(Audacity, Nero WAV editor) can't even manage the even
simpler
operations of Opening and saving a .WAV file, without
changing the
contents.
i.e., If I open a .WAV file, do nothing to it, then
save/export it
with a new name, then compare the result to my original
(fc /b),
there are lots of changes reported (not just at the
beginning of the
file). (And each subsequent save/export produces yet a
different
variant of the file.)
The problem lies with fc as it doesn't know anything about
the
structure of a wav file. It consists of several chunks,
one of them
is headed DATA. That's shouldn't change unless you change
the music
i.e. by deleting/inserting, changing the amplitude, EQ.
Anything else ususally changes because the INFO chunk may
contain the
name of the program that stored the file. Even the header
of the wave
file will change because it stores the length of the file
and the
displacement of the next chunk. As the position of the
chunks are
not fixed, some program will store the DATA chunk before
the INFO
chunk while some other program will store INFO before
DATA.
Good point. There are .wav file comparison tools in CDEX and
EAC (both free downloads) that do know about the structure
of .wav files and report only differences that could be
sonically relevant.