RAW Header-less wav unsigned 8-bit PCM format

Audacity Help Forum Windows
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I am exporting audio data to RAW Header-less wav unsigned 8-bit PCM format. This should be a binary file so I expect to see binary data when I view it but it’s not what I see in my binary editor (EditPad Pro), I just see one long line of random characters. Does this file have a format that should be able to be viewed?

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You’ve not said what data you expect to see, or what data you actually see, but it works OK for me.
Here’s a very short audio track (3 samples) and the hex values of an 8-bit unsigned RAW export:
3bytes.png

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This should be a binary file so I expect to see binary data when I view it but it’s not what I see in my binary editor (EditPad Pro), I just see one long line of random characters.

I’ve never used EditPad Pro… Are you configured for viewing in hexadecimal? It should look like [u]this[/u].

All computer files are a binary!!! A hex editor will show the bytes (converted from binary to hex) and any value that can be converted to an [u]ASCII[/u] will also be shown as a character. For example, everywhere there’s a byte value of 65 (41 hex), you’ll see an ‘A’. The hex editor doesn’t know if the bytes represent audio samples, text, pixels, or a computer-program instruction in an EXE file, etc. And, in the case of 16 or 24-bit words, or floating-point values, the hex editor doesn’t have a clue how to re-construct those values. The application has to know the structure of the file and what the bytes represent.

I just see one long line of random characters.

“Real” audio data always looks random… (A real audio waveform looks pretty random too! :wink: ) That’s especially true with 16-bits or more or with stereo because you’re looking at 8-bit bytes and you can’t “see” where the actual samples are. If you have a sine-wave, square wave, or triangle wave, you might see a “trend”. But with 8000 samples per second or more, it’s generally impossible to get a mental picture of the waveform.


P.S.
Try [u]Sample Data Export[/u]. It won’t show you the raw bytes from the file, but it will show you the “normalized” (1.0 = 100% = 0dB) floating-point values used internally by Audacity, or the dB values.