audio formats supported

[dan]

I recently received a question as to what audio formats are supported
by ACORNS. The answer to this question also applies to WOLF and the
ACORNS Sound Editor application.

The following output formats are supported (along with a short
description of each).

wav - the most universal format, but takes the most disk space
gsm - good compression, but loses a bit of speech quality
spx - good compression, designed for speech. The encoding takes quite
a bit more time than other formats, but decoding it later is
efficient.
aif, aifc - medium compression, a standard on Apple computers
au - introduced by Sun, medium compression, not as widely used

The present releases support all of the above for reading. The present
version only supports the above same formats for writing, but, based
on user request, I'm working on having ACORNS be able to handle mp3
and ogg formats.

mp3 - popular for recording audio. I can't allow ACORNS to be able to
encode mp3 files because of copyright restrictions. I have
successfully decoded mp3 in a test version of the program. The mp3
format provides excellent compression and playback quality.

ogg - An uncopyrighted format with the advantages of mp3. My test
version of ACORNS can decode ogg files. I'm working on an encoder for
ogg, but that will take a bit more work.

I'm hoping to make versions of ACORNS, WOLF, and Sound Editor
available with the additional support for mp3 and ogg formats in the
next week or so.

dan