How to convert 16bit wav to raw audio

Question

I'm trying to use sox to convert asterisk voicemails to raw audio. The encoding information of the original wav is PCM S16 LE, so I thought I would just be able to do sox msg0000.wav msg0001.raw but the raw file from that is garbled and, according to VLC, 4 minutes long, compared to a 6 second source file.

I'm not sure where I'm going wrong, anybody how to convert a wav to raw? Preferably using sox, but any commandline solution will do fine.

Peloquin

Answer 1

Are you sure that your problem is with sox and not VLC? I've also had problems getting VLC to play raw audio. There are command-line options but I didn't quite get them to work.

Before looking for another tool, verify that sox is indeed the problem by trying something like

mplayer -rawaudio samplesize=2:channels=1:rate=8000 -demuxer rawaudio msg0001.raw

Also, sox can be given additional options:

sox msg0000.wav --bits 16 --encoding signed-integer --endian little msg0001.raw

But I suspect that these are the default settings, so they shouldn't be needed.

Discant

You were spot on, the phone that I was testing playback on required a 8 bit ulaw file, which I did not find out until I dove into the documentation for it. VLC failed to play it and when the phone also failed I assumed a mal-formed file. Thanks for the help. – Peloquin

ffmpeg can also do that. – Slimsy