The Audio File Library currently supports 13 of the commonly found audio
file formats, i.e., is able to recognize, read, and write sample data and
header information to and from files in these formats. It is important
not to confuse _s_a_m_p_l_e or _a_u_d_i_o _d_a_t_a _f_o_r_m_a_t_s with _f_i_l_e _f_o_r_m_a_t_s. The
former refers to the bit-wise organization of the sound samples in the
file, i.e., whether the format is 8-bit integer or 16-bit unsigned, etc.
Audio file format refers to the structure of the _a_u_d_i_o _f_i_l_e _h_e_a_d_e_r, the
chunk of on-disk data which preceeds the samples and which provides
information about the file to the audio program. A single audio file
format may support a large variety of sample formats.
The BBBBeeeerrrrkkkkeeeelllleeeeyyyy////IIIIRRRRCCCCAAAAMMMM////CCCCAAAARRRRLLLL SSSSoooouuuunnnndddd FFFFiiiilllleeee FFFFoooorrrrmmmmaaaatttt ((((bbbbiiiiccccssssffff)))) was developed during
the 1980's and represented the merging of several earlier header formats.
It is used extensively in academic computer music centers, and is the
default file format for several sound synthesis packages such as MIT's
Csound. It consists of a fixed-length header of 1024 bytes. The first
17 bytes are reserved for sample format information; the remainder is
used for optional "sfcodes" which provide additional information such as
maximum amplitude, creation date, or a text comment.