How to Load a Wave File
by Nathan "nPawn" Davidson

I get tons of e-mail asking me how to load in a wave file so it can be used and played in programs. This tutorial will hopefully answer these question and i'll provide some C source code on how to do this - no this won't be the most beautiful or efficient code, there are definitely ways to speed up this loading process, rather, this will be a way of providing easy instructions and some code for those trying to load .wav files. I suggest you also get my Wave File Format description on my website and look at it first and use it in conjunction with this. Some Windows compilers have functions that will automatically load a wave file in for you, but then you lose control of how quickly the data is being read in and you may not have access to all the information you'd get if you loaded it yourself, and you also lose any chance of optimizing the code if you're working with large groups of sound files that require as much speed as possible, so i'll show you how it's done and you can edit the process to your liking. Ok let's get going...

A Wave file, like many graphic and sound files, has a header file at the beginning that describes the sound data contained in the file. This header was created by Microsoft and contains everything we need to know about the sound file and then some. The first 4 bytes in a wave file header in determining if the file we opened is really a wave file. The first four bytes should contain the text "RIFF", RIFF means that it's a microsoft media file of some sort, if we have RIFF it may not necessarily mean we have a wave sound file, RIFF is also at the start of MIDI and other various multimedia files. The next 4 bytes is a 32 bit value describing how big the rest of the file is going to be (not including those first four "RIFF" bytes). Let's write some code to open up a file and read these in:

FILE *fp;

fp = fopen("sound.wav","rb);
if (fp)
{
    BYTE id[4]; //four bytes to hold 'RIFF'
    DWORD size; //32 bit value to hold file size

    fread(id,sizeof(BYTE),4,fp); //read in first four bytes
    if (!strcmp(id,"RIFF"))
    { //we had 'RIFF' let's continue
        fread(size,sizeof(DWORD),1,fp);
        //read in 32bit size value
    }
}

Ok that'll get the first part read in if we read in id and it isn't equal to RIFF then we know this isn't a wave file, if it is then we can continue on. After the 32 bit size value we now should have two more strings to read in that will positively ID the file as a wave file or not. We'll now read in another 4 bytes which should contain the string "WAVE" and then another 4 byte string containing the word "fmt " (notice the extra space after fmt ). The "fmt " string let's us know that the format chunk is coming up afterwards. Let's update our code to reflect this now:

FILE *fp;

fp = fopen("sound.wav","rb);
if (fp)
{
    BYTE id[4]; //four bytes to hold 'RIFF'
    DWORD size; //32 bit value to hold file size

    fread(id,sizeof(BYTE),4,fp); //read in first four bytes
    if (!strcmp(id,"RIFF"))
    { //we had 'RIFF' let's continue
        fread(size,sizeof(DWORD),1,fp);
        //read in 32bit size value
        fread(id,sizeof(BYTE),4,fp);
        //read in 4 byte string now
        if (!strcmp(id,"WAVE"))
        { //this is probably a wave file since it contained "WAVE"
            fread(id,sizeof(BYTE),4,fp); //read in 4 bytes "fmt ";
        }
    }
}

After "fmt " we have a 32 bit value that says how big our following format chunk is going to be, for a typical wave file this will be "16", meaning that we're going to use the next 16 bytes in the file to describe the sound data's format. Be careful though, this value may not always be a 16 - wave files that are compressed (like ADPCM or such) use different format chunk sizes and you may need to adjust, if you don't have a 16 here you may want to abort the load unless you know about the way the compressed file stores it's format info. Let's see what those next 16 bytes are going to be in a typical wave file:

32 bit value saying how big the format chunk is (in bytes)
16 bit value identifying the format tag (identifies way data is stored, 1 here means no compression (PCM), if otherwise it's some other type of format)
16 bit value describing # of channels (1 means mono, 2 means stereo)
32 bit value describing sample rate or number of samples per second (like 44100, 22050, or 11025)
32 bit value describing average # of bytes per second (found by: samplerate*channels*(bitspersample/8)) you probably won't need or use this value
16 bit value describing block alignment (found by: (bitspersample/8)*channels) you probably won't need or use this value either
16 bit value describing bits per sample (8bit or 16bit sound)

Ok now that we know what those next 16 bytes describing the format are, let's add some source code to reflect this:

FILE *fp;

fp = fopen("sound.wav","rb);
if (fp)
{
    BYTE id[4]; //four bytes to hold 'RIFF'
    DWORD size; //32 bit value to hold file size
	//our 16 bit format info values
    short format_tag, channels, block_align, bits_per_sample;
    DWORD format_length, sample_rate, avg_bytes_sec; //our 32 bit format info values

    fread(id, sizeof(BYTE), 4, fp); //read in first four bytes
    if (!strcmp(id, "RIFF"))
    { //we had 'RIFF' let's continue
        fread(size, sizeof(DWORD), 1, fp); //read in 32bit size value
        fread(id, sizeof(BYTE), 4, fp); //read in 4 byte string now
        if (!strcmp(id,"WAVE"))
        { //this is probably a wave file since it contained "WAVE"
            fread(id, sizeof(BYTE), 4, fp); //read in 4 bytes "fmt ";
            fread(format_length, sizeof(DWORD),1,fp);
            fread(format_tag, sizeof(short), 1, fp);
            fread(channels, sizeof(short),1,fp);
            fread(sample_rate, sizeof(DWORD), 1, fp);
            fread(avg_bytes_sec, sizeof(short), 1, fp);
            fread(block_align, sizeof(short), 1, fp);
            fread(bits_per_sample, sizeof(short), 1, fp);
        }
        else
            printf("Error: RIFF file but not a wave file\n");
    }
    else
        printf("Error: not a RIFF file\n");
}

Alright, now we're just about ready to get to the good stuff - the actual sound data, but first we must read in, you guessed it, a 4 byte string containing the word "data" and then a 32 bit value describing how big our data chunk or raw sound chunk is (in bytes). Once we know how big our data chunk is we can set aside the space needed using malloc and start reading in the good stuff. That's all there is to reading in a wave file, and we'll finish up our function:

void Load_Wave_File(char *fname)
{
    FILE *fp;

    fp = fopen(fname,"rb);
    if (fp)
    {
        BYTE id[4], *sound_buffer; //four bytes to hold 'RIFF'
        DWORD size; //32 bit value to hold file size
        short format_tag, channels, block_align, bits_per_sample; //our 16 values
        DWORD format_length, sample_rate, avg_bytes_sec, data_size, i; //our 32 bit values

        fread(id, sizeof(BYTE), 4, fp); //read in first four bytes
        if (!strcmp(id, "RIFF"))
        { //we had 'RIFF' let's continue
            fread(size, sizeof(DWORD), 1, fp); //read in 32bit size value
            fread(id, sizeof(BYTE), 4, fp); //read in 4 byte string now
            if (!strcmp(id,"WAVE"))
            { //this is probably a wave file since it contained "WAVE"
                fread(id, sizeof(BYTE), 4, fp); //read in 4 bytes "fmt ";
                fread(&format_length, sizeof(DWORD),1,fp);
                fread(&format_tag, sizeof(short), 1, fp); //check mmreg.h (i think?) for other 
                                                              // possible format tags like ADPCM
                fread(&channels, sizeof(short),1,fp); //1 mono, 2 stereo
                fread(&sample_rate, sizeof(DWORD), 1, fp); //like 44100, 22050, etc...
                fread(&avg_bytes_sec, sizeof(short), 1, fp); //probably won't need this
                fread(&block_align, sizeof(short), 1, fp); //probably won't need this
                fread(&bits_per_sample, sizeof(short), 1, fp); //8 bit or 16 bit file?
                fread(id, sizeof(BYTE), 4, fp); //read in 'data'
                fread(&data_size, sizeof(DWORD), 1, fp); //how many bytes of sound data we have
                sound_buffer = (BYTE *) malloc (sizeof(BYTE) * data_size); //set aside sound buffer space
                fread(sound_buffer, sizeof(BYTE), data_size, fp); //read in our whole sound data chunk
            }
            else
                printf("Error: RIFF file but not a wave file\n");
        }
        else
            printf("Error: not a RIFF file\n");
    }
}

There you go, it's as easy as that, there's probably a few errors in this code as I didn't have time to compile and test it, and you should probably do a bit more file error checking and other fancy things to make sure the data isn't corrupted and it looks ok. Once you have it loaded it's very simple to work with, you can manipulate your sound_buffer any way you need to or put it into a structure that windows applications like (look up WAVEFORMATEX in your compilers reference section). If your format_tag is something other than a 1 (1 means your data is stored in PCM or Pulse Code Modulation form) then you have some sort of compressed file, and in order to handle it you're going to have to know exactly how that data is compressed, and with so many formats out there (see mmreg.h I think? for a list of all the format tags) it's not practical that you're going to be able to handle all of them. Good luck...

Disclaimer and Distribution Info

If you want to see some other sound tutorials then head over to my web site, currently located at:
http://www.aros.net/~npawn/

Reprinted with permission

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Date this article was posted to GameDev.net: 9/14/1999
(Note that this date does not necessarily correspond to the date the article was written)

See Also:
Audio File Formats

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