Sonifex Pty Ltd T/A Innes Corporation
12/6 Leighton Pl
Hornsby, NSW 2077, Australia
Phone: +61 2 9987 0499
Fax: +61 2 9476 4950
E-mail:
Website: http://www.innescorp.com.au
10
Digitorc 4 Manual
Extended Bit Depth Audio
Traditionally, PC-based audio capture and playback has been restricted to either 8 bit or 16 bit
encoding, with the WAVE_FORMAT_PCM descriptor used to define the audio parameters such
as samples per second, bits per sample and number of channels.
With the advent of 24 bit A/D and D/A converters, there was a need to support extended bit
depth. To achieve this, Microsoft introduced a new data format descriptor called
WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE. This provides additional information, including the number of
valid bits per sample and support for specifying channel placement in multichannel streams.
The WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE descriptor may be used in place of the normal
WAVE_FORMAT_PCM in setting up playback and recording through either the Winmm (wave)
API or the DirectSound API. For further information refer to the Microsoft DirectX 8
documentation.
Some audio editing applications, such as Syntrillium’s Cooledit 2000 and Adobe Audition,
support extended bit depth audio and work well with the Digitorc 4 using 24 or 32 bit recording.
