Common Formats
Like files written by different word processors or
different spreadsheet programs, waveform files can differ
substantially in their format. Several waveform file formats are in
very common use today. On MacIntosh computers, AIFF and AIFC formats
are typical, on computers running MS-DOS and Windows, RIFF (also called
Microsoft Wave) format is common. Many Unix workstations use what is
referred to as AU format. There are additionally many special-purpose
research formats for speech waveform data, notably, ILS format (named
after a software package which supported the format), ESPS format
(another commercial speech processing software package), ADC format
(developed at CMU and used on some early speech databases), and Sphere
format (developed for speech recognition databases and distributed by
NIST).