SGI Audio Tools
Introduction
Prerequisites
This article assumes you have the
Authoring a Song with the SGI Audio Tools
Compressing Sounds
Converting samples with SoX
SoX bills itself as the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs. It's uses include (but aren't limited to) converting audio between formats, providing effects, and even recording. Given that it's an open-source tool it's well worth including into any game developer's setup.
The tabledesign and vadpcm_enc tools require audio samples to be in AIFF or AIFC. If the samples you're using are in a different format, such as WAV, you can use SoX to batch-convert your samples. It's also a good idea to resample each effect to the same sample rate, such as 32000Hz. If you're generating your bank file via a script, you can assume the sample rate to save time.
If we want to convert an arbitrary WAV file to AIFF with a sample rate of 32000 and in mono we can enter:
sox some_file.wav -r 32000 -c 1 converted_file.aiff