RIFF is a format by Microsoft and IBM which is similar in spirit andfunctionality as EA-IFF-85, but not compatible (and it's in little-endian byte order, of course :-). WAVE is RIFF's equivalent of AIFF, and its inclusion in Microsoft Windows 3.1 has suddenly made itimportant to know about.
Rob Ryan was kind enough to send me a description of the RIFF format.Unfortunately, it is too big to include here (27 k), but I've made itavailable for anonymous ftp as ftp.cwi.nl:/pub/audio/RIFF- format.
The complete definition of the WAVE file format as defined by IBM and Microsoft is available for anonymous FTP from ftp.microsoft.com, indirectory developer/MSDN/CD8 as file RIFFNE.ZIP, which contains a MShelp file (riffne.hlp).
Mark Stout (marks@crystal.cirrus.com) clarifies:
RIFFNE.HLP,
Multimedia Standards Update: New Multimedia Data Types and DataTechniques 2.1.0, has only extensions onto the original Multimedia Programming Interface and Data Specifications 1.0, which Bob Ryan has made an excerpt from. Most people only need the original spec (BobRyan's excerpt).
However, for information on most compressed audioformats, they should obtain RIFFNE.HLP.
Conor Frederick Prischmann (conor@owlnet.rice.edu)points to two more sites:
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