Audio File Library

The Audio File Library provides a uniform and elegant API for accessing a variety of audio file formats, such as AIFF/AIFF-C, WAVE, NeXT/Sun .snd/.au, Berkeley/IRCAM/CARL Sound File, Audio Visual Research, Amiga IFF/8SVX, and NIST SPHERE. Supported compression formats are currently G.711 mu-law and A-law and IMA and MS ADPCM.

Key goals of the Audio File Library are file format transparency and data format transparency. The same calls for opening a file, accessing and manipulating audio metadata (e.g. sample rate, sample format, textual information, MIDI parameters), and reading/writing sample data will work with any supported audio file format. Likewise, the format of the audio data presented to the application need not be tied to the format of the data contained in the file.

The Audio File Library distributed under the GNU Library General Public License.

The Audio File Library is maintained using BitKeeper. View the Audio File Library repository.

SGI's documentation (mirror) on the Audio File Library gives a good overview of the library and its programming interface. I am still working on documentation for this project; those who'd like to help are urged to contact me.


Version 0.2.6 (released on Friday, 5 March 2004) passes muster under the following operating environments:

It should work on most flavors of Unix. Please get in touch with me if you've encountered (or surmounted) difficulty building the library on your computer.


Download version 0.2.6 of the Audio File Library. (Feel free to check GPG signature or verify the MD5 sum as 9c1049876cd51c0f1b12c2886cce4d42.)

What's new in version 0.2.6:

The Audio File Library is included in the GNOME and KDE projects. It's also listed on Freshmeat.

Feel free to send me your comments, suggestions, money, or booze.

For more information on audio file formats, the Audio File Format FAQ is a good source of information.


Software which uses the Audio File Library

Shouldn't you use it too?

Related Work


Michael Pruett (michael at 68k dot org), Friday 5 March 2004