OT: origin of file length in WAV (Re: [linux-audio-user] Converting w64 to wav)

Steve Harris wrote:

> [OT] I have no idea why someone chose to add a required, fixed length file
> length parameter to the WAV format, but they deserve a good wack with the
> clue stick.

WAV is based on the "Resource Interchange Format" (RIFF) and the RIFF header
contains an entry for the file length. RIFF is a modification of IFF and IFF was
created by Electronic Arts for the Amiga.

Here is a quote from the "EA IFF 85" Standard for Interchange Format Files,
January 14, 1985:

"One chunk output technique is to stream write a chunk header, stream write the
chunk contents, then random access back to the header to fill in the size.
Another technique is to make a preliminary pass over the data to compute the
size, then write it out all at once."
(http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/mxr/gfx/2d/IFF.txt)

I doubt that the author of that document (Jerry Morrison) and the contributors
(which are listed at the end) should be blamed for that. They probably did not
expect that such aspects of their standard would survive for two decades.

Cheers,
Andreas
Received on Mon Jan 10 04:15:23 2005