Read a wav file in c

Once you compile it and run it, it accepts the path of a wav file from the command line and dumps the structure information including the size of each sample and the total duration of the wav audio.

Thanks a lot for such a nice tutorial. In fact I used your code it was working properly. I have a question if suppose the wave header is of not 44 bytes may be 48 bytes or any other length how the code structure would be?

There are non-standard wav file formats which are used, where the header size will be more than 44 bytes. Some of the commercial audio programs and music softwares add their own undocumented data into the header. It means that a really robust program would go on parsing the file till it finds a valid header instead of assuming that it will always be at the beginning.

This is much like parsing an MP3 file where the header can be anywhere in the file. Jay The code uses byte shifting to convert from little endian to big endian.

Correct me if I am wrong. But this is a very simple file — one c file and which includes a header file. It should run in any IDE. Any idea why it is so? Perhaps you want to use an external library or create a class for array handling.

One alternative is to use the vector class from STL. Actually I mean that which part of the program are we dealing with the actual samples of the audio file? Which variable are they stored, if so? Amit, The actual samples I obtained from matlab are all in the range of -1 to 1 whereas the values obtained from this program are in the ranges of also. What could be the reason for that? Is that because of endianness? Okay, no worries.. Thanks for your help. Though my wave file was in the same working directory.

Also argv[1] was null. Hello Amit, finally I got my output as expected. Thanks so much for this code. What solved the problem was in the part where conversion from little endian to big endian occurs, i.

In the code you just put the location of the wave file in your hard disk. We redirect you to this notice instead of stripping out the link to preserve the integrity of the post. I got the program to read audio. Facebook Like. Twitter Tweet. Be a part of the DaniWeb community. Sign Up — It's Free! We can access them directly.

Now that the most relevant parts of the implementation have been explained, we can present the results for an example wave file. Reading the header of a wav file Published by One Step! Code on January 23, An example of the contents of the header for a wave file can be found below. Allocating header bytes The bytes stored in the wave file header will be read byte-by-byte and stored in an array.

Numerical data types sizes The size of the numerical data fields in the header is either 2 or 4 bytes long. Big and little-endian Besides the length in bytes of numerical data, another fact that needs to be considered is the order in which these bytes are stored.

Source left right. Published in Programming. Let's write a C program to open a file from a hard disk whose name is entered by a user and to display its contents on the screen. The file must be present in the directory in which the executable file of the program exists. Function fopen is used to open a file; it returns a pointer to structure FILE, which is a predefined structure in the "stdio. If the file opening is successful, then it returns a pointer to the file, and if it's unable to open it, then it returns NULL.

Function fgetc returns a character read from the file, and the fclose function closes the file.