Playing WAV audio without converting to PDA format

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1

Hello, I'm trying to load audio files directly from the Data folder without having to compile them to PDA. I'm on Mac OS.

Will (from Panic) said on Discord that the files can be played without conversion, albeit with a performance hit. However, when I try that, I get the error message: couldn't read header.

I tried an alternative approach, which is to convert WAV files to PDA on-device using a script written by Dave (from Panic). Although the files do successfully play in this case, they play at double speed, even when encoded at 44kHz 16 bit mono as the script suggests.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get this working?

Alternatively, if anyone has a way to convert an audio file to PDA without use of the SDK -- I've seen a Node script floating around that claims to do just that -- I would be very interested! Thank you!

2

I suppose you could try reproducing that part of pdc in SDK code. The PDA format is pretty well documented here so there shouldn't be much of a problem writing it.

3

It's worth a try! Thanks for the link.

4

I ended up making my own! With some additional pointers from Scratchminer.

Here's the GitHub repo: GitHub - ejb/wav-pda-converter: Converting between WAV and Playdate Audio files

It's still a work in progress but I've got regular PCM-encoded WAV files working already.

5

@Orllewin is Turbine available anywhere?

6

No yet, I'll get it in a repo somewhere next week and try and find time so finish it.

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7

Excited to say that my converter now has an easy-to-use web UI.

It's still missing support for ADPCM format files though. Turns out they're a bit more complicated than the standard PCM ones.

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