cswave

cswave is a small, cross-platform utility to convert CSV sample data to WAVE files. This can be used to do further analysis or processing on the data using audio tooling.

Any column of the input file can be used as sample data for a resulting monophonic wave file, in one of the supported formats

i8: 8 bit unsigned integer data
i16: 16bit signed little-endian data
i32: 32bit signed little-endian data
f32: 32bit IEEE float data
nf32: 32bit IEEE float data, but without the normalization step

Note that the integer output data formats only use the integer part of the input data, ie. when using the i32 output format, the input sample value 1.23 is truncated to the output sample value 1.

When using the integer output data formats, the exact sample value is preserved (as long as it fits the storage size). For the f32 format, the specification requires that the samples be normalized to the range -1.0 to 1.0, thus the sample values will not be preserved. Use the nf32 sample format when your input data is already normalized and you want to preserve the exact sample values.

Quoted text embedding the separation character within CSV columns will confuse the CSV parser. Don't do that.

Building

To build cswave, running make within the project directory on a machine with a working C compiler should work.

To build the windows executable cswave.exe, the mingw-w64 crosscompiler is required. Use make cswave.exe to build it.

Usage

Call the tool using the invocation

./cswave <file.csv> <file.wav> <column> <samplerate> [<format>] [<delimiter>]

<file.csv>: CSV input file
<file.wav>: Output file, will be overwritten without question if it already exists
<column>: Zero-based column index within the CSV (e.g., 0)
<samplerate>: Integer sample rate of the resulting output file (e.g., 44100)
<format>: Output file sample format as listed above, default i16
<delimiter>: Specify a single character to use as the delimiter within the CSV input, default ,