mathr / blog / #

First port of call was sox. Didn't work, because it doesn't support signed 8-bit sample data. Then I tried ecasound, which spat out the helpful message "Abort!" with no further info. Finally, after much frustration, I typed snd<tab> as a last resort, and lo and behold, there was sndfile-convert in the list of available commands. First attempt failed miserably, "sndfile-convert infile.iff outfile.wav" reported an error code. A look at the man page, which told me to try --help on the command line instead, led me to the final solution: convert to 16bit PCM format with the -pcm16 flag, thusly: sndfile-convert -pcm16 infile.iff outfile.wav

As I had around 200MB of samples to convert, I thought I'd try and find an easier way than converting each file manually, so this is what I did:

find -name "*.iff" -exec sndfile-convert -pcm16 {} {}.wav \;
find -name "*.iff.wav" -exec rename .iff.wav .wav {} \;
find -type d -exec mkdir ../oldiffs/{} \;
find -name *.iff -exec mv {} ../oldiffs/{} \;

Sorted!