What is a RIFF .wav file

[Eep²]

I believe RIFF (Really Idiotic File Format? heh) is a type of encoding, but I'm not sure. I only know of 1 game that uses RIFF-Waves: Tomb Raider. WAV extractors of which are available at http://tnlc.com/eep/tr/utils.html if you're interested. You can try hex editing the WAV you want to use instead, and place the RIFF-Wave header at the beginning, overwriting the previous header. In a hex editor, open a RIFF-Wave from the game you want to replace the sound in to be sure of the exact header, then copy the header over the replacement Wave's header.

So, for example, say the RIFF-Wave has this at the beginning (note space after "WAVEfmt" before the start of the sound data):

RIFF� WAVEfmt <data start>

And the replacement WAV has this:

RIFF8 WAVEfmt <data start>

or this:

RIFF$xWAVEfmt <data start>

Note the difference between "RIFF" and "WAVEfmt": "� " vs "8 " vs "$x". The key is to put the EXACT header in, which is probably what's causing the game engine to crash. I'm not a programmer so I could be wrong, but give it a try anyway. Perhaps you should try one of the programming newsgroups; this is more about design.

To the programmers, http://tnlc.com/eep/sims/#software for a request for a Maxis SimCity 3K/The Sims XA sound converter/player. If you know anything about this format, please email me. Thanks.

Anne wrote:

> This may be off topic for this group but I don't know where else to post it.
>
> A game engine I have uses a wav file that occurs only occassionaly and it is
> called a RIFF? When I put just any wav file in place of the RIFF the game
> engine crashes. How do I find out if a wav is of the RIFF type? Is there a
> way to convert an ordinary wav into a RIFF format?
>
> Thanks for any help

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http://tnlc.com/eep/ - Active Worlds, Tomb Raider, 3D game comparison, The Sims
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[L.J. Wischik]

Eep^2 <e...@tnlc.com> wrote:
>I believe RIFF (Really Idiotic File Format? heh) is a type of

>encoding, but I'm not sure... [snip]

RIFF stands for 'Resource Information File Format'. It is essentially a
way of organising a load of separate 'chunks' (each chunk could be a bit
of audio, or video, or picture) into a single file.

Microsoft use RIFF as standard in a couple of parts of DirectX -- most
notably in DirectMusic. In fact they used it back in Win3.1 as a
clipboard format. Also, both .WAV and .AVI files are in fact just RIFF
files, that happen to contain only chunks of a particular type.

There's a relevant looking program called RiffWalk mentioned at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/psdk/tools/mmtls_3uqz.htm

--
Lucian Wischik, Queens' College, Cambridge CB3 9ET. www.wischik.com/lu