[theptip]

What does a "numerical text representation" of a waveform look like? (Not familiar with audio processing but interested to understand your suggestion.)

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Here's a fragment of the representation of a stereo file:

       4.9600227   0.094451904297 -0.014831542969 
       4.9600454   0.089172363281 -0.0092468261719 
        4.960068   0.087493896484 -0.0065612792969 
       4.9600907   0.090179443359 -0.0028686523438 
       4.9601134   0.093963623047 0.0060729980469 
       4.9601361   0.095367431641  0.020538330078 
       4.9601587   0.094299316406  0.035186767578 
       4.9601814    0.09228515625  0.045013427734 
       4.9602041   0.089691162109  0.051422119141 
       4.9602268   0.086059570312  0.058929443359 

Columsn are: [time in seconds] [left channel sample] [right channel sample]

This was generated using

      sox somefile.wav somefile.dat

You can reverse that by reversing the argument order above.

[mlyle]

This has some advantages-- it's numerically precise and can be more flexible, but it has some downsides over the suggested approach.

- The quantization of the graphs is a feature to add some tolerance to the tests. I admit this is a mixed blessing.

- This is a lot more opaque to someone looking at a text file of the test output than what is described in the post.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The opacity of the .dat file is real and deep. But I'd expect the opacity of the go/python/lua/whatever code that generates the .dat to be extremely low, and that's what you'd read.