PCM Header problems

[speeder]

Hello.

I am modding a really old game, that only supports a specific old PCM header...

I tried saving in audacity with the desired format (uncompressed PCM, 8bit, 11k, mono, microsoft .wav), but audacity inserts some new information that totally wrecks the game, like the "FACT" tag.

How I save in a specific PCM format?

Or even better? How I make Audacity stop tyring to save projects and whatnot, and just allow me to double-click a file, select a part of it, press delete, press control+s and then click the X? Because exporting and whatnot is really irritating, specially when it re-writes the header and wrecks the file.

[steve]

Audacity works internally with 32 bit uncompressed audio data. It would possibly be more accurate to describe Audacity as a "production environment" rather than a sample editor (though people would generally have no idea what that means, so it just gets called a multi-track audio editor). When you open an audio file in Audacity, in order to be able to do all the clever stuff that it can do, Audacity imports that audio and creates hundreds of little chunks of data that you will see if you look in a project data folder. It is not processing the actual file directly, so you can not just do; Open file > Edit > Save.

As far as I was aware, Audacity does not add any tags to WAV files, so I can't help you with that part of your question.

[speeder]

It add a FACT tag that was recently added to the RIFF PCM format, it is to tell how much samples the file has...

Also it seemly adds other stuff that are unknown to me (like some extra bytes on the end).

But I still don't figured how to make it save in the RIFF PCM format without any extra data on the header but the basic file format (ie: the old format only stores the rate and bit resolution, newer formats store stuff like samples on the file, author name, software metadata, and all sorts of stuff, because the RIFF format actually allows you do save any arbitrary data that you want on a file...)

[steve]

Have you had a look at the Custom FFMpeg Export option to see if the format that you require is supported by ffmpeg?

[speeder]

I don't figured how to make ffmpeg work... I went to the download buttom, went to the page, downlaoded ffmpeg, installed, and when I pressed "locate" the file was automatically selected, but the program still says that ffmpeg is not installed... I tested closing and opening it multiple times and selecting diffrent versions of ffmpeg...

[steve]

I think there have been some recent updates to Audacity to address issues reported by a few users regarding problems locating ffmpeg.

The latest Windows version of Audacity is available from here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... s_Binaries

Also, in case you have any other versions of check that you point Audacity to the correct version.
The only information that I have about custom ffmpeg export is here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... peg_Export

[speeder]

FFMPEG is saving files with 0kb

[steve]

I am modding a really old game, that only supports a specific old PCM header...

What computer platform was this game designed to run on?
What sort of computer/operating system are you using?

[speeder]

The game was for DOS using SoundBlaster as soundcard... DosBox can emulate it. To be more exact, the game is Prince of Persia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_ ... ideo_game))

I am using Audacity on a Windows XP SP3

[steve]

"Prince of Persia" - I remember that game - getting stuck behind the gate and waiting for the mouse to let you out The graphics were really impressive in its day

Just thinking, if you need a really old PCM header, I wonder if you could use a really old audio editor to import your "modern" WAV files and export them as "old" WAV files?

I'm just trying to think of any programs that might do the job - I used to use a wave editor that came with my SoundBlaster AWE32 sound card, I wonder if that is still available. Audacity is available right back to version 0.8 on the Sourceforge website. http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/files/

I wonder if it would be worth you asking on the Hydrogen Audio forum - there's some people there with a lot of esoteric knowledge about audio formats: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/