Audio File Library

source code [github]
download version 0.3.6

The Audio File Library is a C-based library for reading and writing audio files in many common formats.

The Audio File Library provides a uniform API which abstracts away details of file formats and data formats. The same calls for opening a file, accessing and manipulating audio metadata (e.g. sample rate, sample format, textual information, MIDI parameters), and reading and writing sample data will work with any supported audio file format. The Audio File Library lets you work with audio data in whatever format is most convenient for you.

Supported file formats:

• AIFF/AIFF-C (.aiff, .aifc)
• WAVE (.wav)
• NeXT .snd/Sun .au (.snd, .au)
• Berkeley/IRCAM/CARL Sound File (.sf)
• Audio Visual Research (.avr)
• Amiga IFF/8SVX (.iff)
• Sample Vision (.smp)
• Creative Voice File (.voc)
• NIST SPHERE (.wav)
• Core Audio Format (.caf)
• FLAC (.flac)

Supported compression formats:

• G.711 mu-law and A-law
• IMA ADPCM
• Microsoft ADPCM
• FLAC
• ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec)

GNU Library General Public License

SGI's documentation (mirror)

What's new in version 0.3.6:

• Implement FLAC and ALAC encoding and decoding.
• Update license to LGPL 2.1.

What's new in version 0.3.5:

• Implement IMA ADPCM encoding and decoding for AIFF-C, CAF, and WAVE files.
• Implement Microsoft ADPCM encoding for WAVE files.
• Fix calculation of IRCAM frame size.
• Record marker comments in WAVE files.
• Improve validation of compressed audio formats.
• Add support for building without documentation.

What's new in version 0.3.4:

• Use hidden visibility for internal symbols.
• Add support for Sample Vision format.
• Update license for extended-precision floating-point conversion routines.

What's new in version 0.3.3:

• Update library's soname version.
• Link against libm.

What's new in version 0.3.2:

• Fix initialization of byte order in Creative Voice File format.
• Fix calculation of frame count in NIST SPHERE sound files.
• Remove duplicate definition of AFvirtualfile.
• Don't treat compiler warnings as errors by default.

What's new in version 0.3.1:

• Fix installation of man pages.
• Add support for Creative Voice File format.
• Support u-law and A-law compression in Core Audio Format files.

What's new in version 0.3.0:

• Define AFframecount and AFfileoffset as 64-bit integers regardless of whether system specifies off_t as 64 bits.
• Added support for Core Audio Format.
• Added support for extensible WAVE format files.
• Fixed leak of miscellaneous data buffers. (Thanks to Stefano Magni for finding and fixing this problem.)
• Fixed default mapping between integer and floating-point audio data.
• Fix handling of NeXT sound files with unspecified or inconsistent length.
• Added support for miscellaneous data in IFF/8SVX files.
• Added support for byte-swapped IRCAM sound files.
• Refactored file parsing and writing.
• Refactored audio conversion.
• Updated and expanded documentation.

Related Work

• Chris Bagwell and Lance Norskog's SoX
• Erik de Castro Lopo's libsndfile
• GNU ccAudio
• Conrad Parker's summary of support for textual data in sound files
• Tom Erbe's AIFF-C information
• Audio File Format FAQ