Converting RAW audio data to WAV with scripting

Question

I have a large number of .RAW audio files (unsigned 8-bit PCM with no-endianness) which I want to convert to .WAV files. What command-line tool (windows or linux) can I use

Answer 1

Let's use Sox, it's available pretty much everywhere.

On mac:

brew install sox

On Ubuntu (tested 18.04):

sudo apt update && sudo apt install sox -y

I tend to use 16k SR, 16-bit precision with encoding 16-bit Signed Integer PCM so will use those defaults. My files are .raw but could also be .pcm etc.

# assume you're in the directory with the raw wavs - we'll make a new wavs directory to put the converted ones
mkdir -p wavs

# 1-liner
for f in *.raw; do sox -r 16000 -e signed -b 16 -c 1 "$f" wavs/"${f%.*}.wav"; done

To check that the wav files have their header, use soxi:

rob@tp:~/wavs$ soxi test.wav 

Input File     : 'test.wav'
Channels       : 1
Sample Rate    : 16000
Precision      : 16-bit
Duration       : 00:00:12.62 = 201984 samples ~ 946.8 CDDA sectors
File Size      : 404k
Bit Rate       : 256k