# About spwave

User's Guide > About spwave

## Introduction

spwave is an audio file editor supporting several sound formats including WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, ALAC, raw, and more. The program is designed for research use, so stability and usability are regarded as important. spwave runs on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux.

## Features

spwave has following features.

- Support for multiple platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux (Motif, gtk), etc.
- Support for WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, ALAC, raw, and text files by using plug-ins.
- Support for many bits/samples: 8bits, 16bits, 24bits, 32bits, 32bits float, 64bits double.
- Converting the sampling frequency and the bits/sample of a file.
- Playing, zooming, cropping, deleting, extracting, etc. of a selected region.
- Fade-in, fade-out, gain adjustment, channel swapping, etc of a selected region.
- Editing file information that supports comments of WAV and AIFF, and ID3 tag of MP3.
- Analysis of a selected region using several analysis types, e.g. spectrum, smoothed spectrum, phase, unwrapped phase and group delay.
- Undoing and redoing without limitation of the number of times.
- Waveform extraction by drag & drop.
- Opening files by drag & drop.
- Autosaving of selected regions (you can do this by drag & drop also).
- Saving positions and regions as labels.
- Viewing some waveforms and setting regions synchronously.
- Almost all processing is 64 bits processing internally.

## Supported Files

- Reading and Writing
  - Raw file (8bits PCM, 16bits PCM, 24bits PCM, 32bits PCM, 32bits float PCM, 64bits double PCM, ulaw, alaw)
  - WAV file (8bits PCM, 16bits PCM, 24bits PCM, 32bits PCM, ulaw, alaw, ADPCM, IMA ADPCM, GSM 6.10)
  - AIFF file (8bits PCM, 16bits PCM, 24bits PCM, 32bits PCM)
  - AIFC file (8bits PCM, 16bits PCM, 24bits PCM, 32bits PCM, 32bits float PCM, ulaw, alaw)
  - CAF file (8bits PCM, 16bits PCM, 24bits PCM, 32bits PCM, 32bits float PCM, 64bits double PCM, ulaw, alaw)
  - MP3 file (MPEG1 layer 3, writing MP3 requires another plugin package)
  - Ogg Vorbis file
  - FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) file
  - ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) file (supports .caf and .mp4 extensions)
  - Windows Media Audio file (Windows version only)
  - Monkey's Audio (.ape) file
  - AU/SND file (8bits PCM, 16bits PCM, 24bits PCM, 32bits PCM, ulaw, alaw, G721, G723)
  - PARIS file (16bits PCM, 24bits PCM)
  - NIST file (16bits PCM, 24bits PCM, 32bits PCM, ulaw, alaw)
  - IRCAM file (16bits PCM, 32bits PCM, ulaw, alaw)
  - Text file
- Reading Only
  - MP3 file (MPEG2 layer 3, also supports VBR)
  - RMP file (MPEG1 layer 3, MPEG2 layer 3, also supports VBR)

## Install

On Windows and macOS, you can install spwave just by unpacking the archive. However, if you want to move the executable to another folder, you have to move plug-ins with it. If you don't do that, spwave can load no files. Linux version requires installing plug-ins (spPlugin 0.8.2 or higher) before installing spwave. Using RPM version (for Redhat-based Linux) or deb version (for Debian-based Linux) is easier way.

Uninstallation can be simply done by removing files. You can remove the files safely because spwave doesn't use the registry and doesn't replace system files. If you installed RPM/deb version on Linux, you should uninstall it based on the usage of RPM/deb.

To compile the source code on Linux/Unix, see How to compile.

## Supported Platforms

spwave is known to work at least on Windows 7/8/10/11, macOS 10.14-13.2, and Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu, etc.).

## Bugs

A level meter introduced from version 0.6.7 does not display exact amplitude.

Although support of ASIO driver is added in version 0.6.11-2b, ``ASIO Multimedia Driver'' doesn't work well. Please use an ASIO driver of an ASIO supported device. Since ``ASIO Multimedia Driver'' is used for non-ASIO devices, you probably don't suffer from that practically.

Window scrolling in Windows Media Audio file which is supported by version 0.6.12-4b does not work correctly (the time position does not coincide with the actual time line). It has not been clarified yet if the problem is caused by the Microsoft's library or my implementation. If you have trouble with the problem, please save the file as the WAV format.

Mac OS X (Carbon) version has a bug that right-click of a mouse doesn't work correctly on the waveform overview display. macOS Cocoa version doesn't have this problem.

## Bug Report

If you have questions or find bugs, please send me an e-mail. Please include the following information when you report bugs.

- Version of spwave (or the file name of the downloaded archive)
- Version of the operating system (e.g. Windows 10 Pro 1809, macOS 10.14.1, etc.)
- Symptoms in delail
- Version of the plugin if the bug is associated with a particular file. e.g. the bug is related to writing MP3 files.

Including `spwave' in the subject of the e-mail is also helpful for me.

I have received many e-mails related to saving as MP3. The function saving as MP3 is turned off as default to avoid the license and patent related problems of MP3. To turn on the function, you have to download and install the MP3 output plugin. Please download and install the plugin if your condition agrees with the condition at the official site.

## License

spwave is free software. Please see LICENSE.txt included in the archive for more information.

## Official Site

The official web site is:

> https://www-ie.meijo-u.ac.jp/labs/rj001/spLibs/spwave/index.html

## Thanks To

spwave uses the following libraries. I'd like to thank developers of the libraries.

- AU/SND, PARIS, NIST, IRCAM, WAV ADPCM, ... (introduced from version 0.6.8)
  - libsndfile
    Reading and writing of many of above formats was made possible by libsndfile. Thanks Erik.
- Ogg Vorbis (introduced from version 0.6.8)
  - libvorbis and libogg
- Monkey's Audio (Windows 32bit version only; introduced from version 0.6.11)
  - https://www.monkeysaudio.com/
- FLAC (introduced from version 0.8.4-3)
  - libFLAC
- ALAC (introduced from version 0.8.4-3)
  - the Apple Lossless Audio Codec Project
- MP3 reading (included in spMpeg plugin package)
  - FreeAmp's (currently known as Zinf) decoding engine
- ASIO implementation (introduced from version 0.6.11; included in the asio plugin)
  - Steinberg ASIO Software Developer Kit
    Copyright notice: ASIO is a trademark of Steinberg Soft- und Hardware GmbH

I also would like to thank people who send me patches, bug reports, and requests.

User's Guide > About spwave

Last modified: "2024-10-26 12:09:09 hideki"