Q: What are the supported audio formats?
Formats supported directly and natively are:
- WAVE (*.wav) container including any of:
- unsigned 8-bit PCM (u8)
- unsigned 16-bit PCM (u16le)
- IEEE float 32-bit (f32le)
- A-law (alaw)
- µ-law (mulaw)
- ADPCM
- FLAC codec inside FLAC (*.flac) container
- OPUS codec inside OGG (*.opus) container
Other audio formats must be converted to one of those natively supported using external tools.
SPE server can be configured do this conversion automatically in background, see Understand SPE audio converter article.
Great tools for converting other than supported formats to supported are FFmpeg (http://www.ffmpeg.org) or SoX (http://sox.sourceforge.net/). Both are multiplatform software tools for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple OS X. Example of usage:
FFmpeg
ffmpeg -i <source_audio_file_name> <output_audio_base_name>.wav
This command converts any supported format/codec audio file to normalized WAV audio format in 16-bit PCM little-endian as it is the default system. For more parameters please check FFmpeg manual pages.
SoX
sox <source_audio_file_name> -b 16 <output_audio_base_name>.wav
Number of bits defined by -b parameter must be specified.