aiff-grokker: examine and edit AIFF files

aiff-grokker allows you to examine and edit the structure of AIFF files.

Version 0.2.1, 2014 January 3.

AIFF is a rather simple audio format, originally defined by Apple. This is a simple tool which allows you to:

List the structure or length of an AIFF file in a variety of formats.
Split a file into smaller chunks, or extract part of it to stdout.
Read and write AIFF file 'comments'.
Easily convert AIFF files to other formats (using lame).

The AIFF spec is available at http://preserve.harvard.edu/standards/audioiffspecification1-3.pdf.

The code is available at bitbucket.org.

Usage

show file info: aiff-grokker [-v] -l [-i] <filename> ...
show file duration: aiff-grokker [-v] -t <filename> ...
split file: aiff-grokker [-v] -sn [-otemplate] <filename>
extract part of file: aiff-grokker [-v] -xoffset+duration [-ofilename] [-mmimetype] <filename>
set file info: aiff-grokker [-vf] [-c spec] [-a s] [-n s] -otemplate <filename>
show help and exit: aiff-grokker -h

Options:

-a str: Set author name to str in output file
-c @file: Read comments from file, one per line.
-c str: Read comments from string, separated by '#'.
-f: When setting file info, allows information to be replaced (`force').
-h: Show this help
-i: Include file name as _comment in output.
-l: List structure of AIFF chunks from multiple files. The output is in an easy-to-parse s-expression-like format.
-m mime-type: Output as audio/x-aiff or audio/mpeg.
-n str: Set name (ie, title) of output file to str
-o template: Specify the output file template when splitting. When used along with -s this must include one `%d' string, but for the set-file options, there must be no such format string.
-s n: Split file into chunks of length n; `n' is an integer, followed by units `s' for seconds, `m' for minutes, or `f' for frames.
-t: Display length of the AIFF file's audio, in milliseconds.
-v: Be verbose.
-V: Display version information.
-x spec: Extract part of the file to stdout or the -o file. The format of the spec is either offset+duration or offset+duration+beepoffset (all times in seconds). In the second case, a beep is inserted into the extracted audio, `beepoffset' seconds from the start.

Release notes


Release 0.2.1, 2014 January 3

  * Source moved to bitbucket; licence changed to BSD 2-clause
  * Portability fixes.

Release 0.2, 2010 December 13

  * Initial public release (after being in use for some time internally)

Download and installation

Download and unpack the distribution tarball.

To configure, build and install, just use:

% ./configure
% make
% make install

That will install the software into /usr/local. If you want it to go somewhere else, then (as usual with ./configure), specify the alternative location as the argument to configure's --prefix option. See ./configure --help for more details.

Run make check to run some self-tests (one of these requires scsh to run, but you can just ignore that one if you don't have scsh installed).

Norman
2014 January 3