Archiving tapes

[Jules Richardson]

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 10:21 -0600, Jim Leonard wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 04:38:02PM -0800, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
> > Actually, my recommendation is AIFF. The problem with .wav is that billg
> > et al have bastardized the format to contain any kind of sound, with any
> > kind of compression (there are even MP3 encoded .wav files -- no joke).
> 
> I wouldn't consider that a problem, as you can clearly specify what
> format you want when saving.  99% of .WAV files you can find are
> uncompressed anyway.

I was actually going to say that WAV format is one of the few things
that MS had left alone and not screwed up, but from that post it seems
not :( 

I always thought it was uncompressed raw audio, just with a short header
(am I remembering 44 bytes right?) on the front describing cycles/sec,
stereo/mono etc.  - making it a pretty clean format. But if you can
potentially get hit with all sorts of unknown encoding within then it's
suddenly no use to anyone :(