WAV formats - studying and compiling info

I have started to learn

wavtools/wavtools-1.3.2/
wavtools2/wavtools-0.2.1/
wavplay2/wavplay-1.4/

wavplay 1.4: Copyright (C) 1997 by Warren W. Gay VE3WWG (and Erik de Castro Lopo)
My comment:
* This is a very basic audio player (plays WAV). I didn't try the wavrec nor the X app that comes in the package. It works really well in all kinds of files I have tested.

If you use a poor Linux distro (as myself, RedHat 7.2 -- wow...so old, I know), try to do a 'chmod a+w /dev/dsp' as root, to be able to listen something ;))

The kind of programming made here is quite easy to understand. E.g.:

int WaveReadHeader (int wavefile,int *channels,u_long *samplerate,int *samplebits,u_long *samples,u_long *datastart,ErrFunc erf);

wavtools 0.2.1: Steve Morphet (email), at www.morphet.org.uk. Registered at freshmeat.net.
My comment:
Is by far the best WAV lib I saw in the net. It is well structured. Most of all, it compiles smoothly, including all manuals. It's a real Rolls-Royce.
We cannot have it all: it doesn't play any sound. But again, it's perfectly made.

./wavinfo ~/Gypsy.wav
WAV header info:
File length: 46346252.
Format: PCM Type 1.
2 channels.
44100 samples per second.
16 bits per sample.
4 byte block alignment.
WAV has 3 chunks:
Chunk 0: "fmt " at 12. 16 bytes of data beginning at 20.
Chunk 1: "data" at 36. 46346160 bytes of data beginning at 44.
Chunk 2: "LIST" at 46346204. 40 bytes of data beginning at 46346212.
Length: 11586540 samples.
Time: 262.733 seconds. (4 min 22.733 sec).

wavtools 1.3.2: Colin Ligertwood (I saw no record of a project, I do not know if his email is still valid)
My comment:
* I did learn a lot with this simple code; where other programs were nice and clean, this was simple and direct -- I do not call it dirty.


Currently I am tempted to use Steve Morphet's lib/services to be able to extend the work of mp3query to a kind of wavquery, i.e., to be able to get and set the artist names on WAV files.
This is possible in WAV files, several chunks are possible, including "LIST" data. Refer to the pink line, on chunk 2 of Gypsy.wav

02C32FC8 09 00 09 00 09 00 09 00 09 00 09 00 09 00 09 00 09 00 09 00 4C 49 53 54 ....................LIST
02C32FE0 28 00 00 00 49 4E 46 4F 49 41 52 54 0E 00 00 00 46 6C 65 65 74 77 6F 6F (...INFOIART....Fleetwoo
02C32FF8 64 20 4D 61 63 00 49 4E 41 4D 06 00 00 00 47 79 70 73 79 00 d Mac.INAM....Gypsy.

The hexedit dump shows the 40 bytes of information data, starting with tag INFO.

INFOIART[0E][00][00][00]Fleetwood Mac[00]INAM[06][00][00][00]Gypsy[00]