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Audio File Inspector

AudioFileInspector/audio_file_inspector.html

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Audio File Inspector

Audio File Inspector is a simple utility that describes the contents of various types of audio file (for example WAV files or MIDI sequences). It started out as a developer tool to aid in writing code that reads these various formats, but has been released because some people may find it useful for diagnosing problems playing back various media files.

Audio File Formats are notoriously vague and it is likely that you will have some files on your computer that cause Audio File Inspector to generate an error message. If you encounter a problem, then feel free to zip the file up and email it to me and I will consider updating the utility to support your file.

Supported File Types

The current version of Audio File Inspector supports the following file types:

  • MID - This will enumerate each event in the MIDI file. At the moment it reports the time of the event in terms of "absolute time". A future update will turn this into measures, beats and ticks (M:B:T)
  • SF2 - This examines a SoundFont file, reporting all the instruments, zones and audio files contained within
  • WAV - This will report the format of the audio data, as well as providing binary dumps of any extra chunks of information.
  • MAP - This can extract some information from a Cakewalk drum map file.

Download

A link to the latest version of Audio File Inspector can be found here.

Installation

Audio File Inspector requires the .NET framework version 3.5 to be installed. You can download this here. Once you have done this you can run the installer which will add a right-click "Describe" action to Windows Explorer for each of the supported file types.

Usage

There are a variety of ways in which you can load a file into Audio File Inspector for analysis.

  • Right-click a supported file in Windows explorer and click "Describe"
  • Use the File|Open menu option to select a file to analyse
  • Drag a file from Windows explorer onto the title-bar of Audio File Inspector
  • You can also drag a file over the executable itself or run Audio File Inspector from the command line with a filename as an argument.

Tools Menu

On the tools menu you can find commands that allow you to clear the log or to save its contents to disk (you are of course free to edit the contents in any way you like before saving it). There is also an options form, which in this version simply allows you to recreate or remove the right-click "Describe" option in Windows Explorer.

Version History

The latest version of Audio File Inspector can be found at http://naudio.codeplex.com.

  • v0.1 2 Nov 2006
    • First public beta release
    • Support for WAV, MID, SF2 and MAP