Looking for a Linux or Windows command line .WAV file checker

Question

I am trying to find a command line program (Windows or Linux) that can check .WAV files, to see if they are complete, with no corruption or sudden endings.

While I have found several programs that can do this with .mp3 files, I cannot find anything that can do it with .WAV files, apart from a couple of commerical Windows programs that only use a GUI and so cannot be used in scripts.

Answer 1

Here's an article about what a PCM wav file should look like:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/422/projects/WaveFormat/

Should be able to write a little script of some kind to check out the headers and make sure they look OK.

Update:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/cdy1hk

Here's a small utility that may suit your need. It checks the file, outputs some information on the file, and exits. The return code is 0 if successful, nonzero if there's a problem with the file.

It is written in Python and depends on the Python wave library. You can extract the .py file from the zip and examine/run independently, or use the compiled exe along with the support files included.

Seems to work OK for e.g. files output by lame --decode, and catches when I truncate a WAV (checks to make sure the file size is sane).

There is no way to determine if the PCM data has been corrupted without e.g. external checksums, etc.

Update:

Added a bit better error checking. Compiled exe version freaks out when wavcheck.py is in the same folder, so I stuck it in a subfolder (/src). Lol. Updated link above to new file.

Update:

I took a look at shntool as suggested by @boehj -- looks like good software for checking WAV files, and it has nice detailed output. Its output could be trivially parsed or its source code modified to allow for an all-OK exit status in 'info' and/or 'len' mode. As it stands, it has exit code 0 even when it is reporting problems with the file.

Homepage for shntool: http://www.etree.org/shnutils/shntool/

Answer 2

I know this is an old thread, but just in case it is of any use:

The JHOVE tool (which is quite widely used in the archiving / digital libraries domain) includes a WAV module that is able to validate WAV files. Available here:

http://jhove.openpreservation.org/

Don't know how JHOVE's validation compares to the checks that shntool performs.

UPDATE: so after posting my answer I butchered some WAVs myself and then ran them through a number of tools. Full write-up with links to test data and scripts here:

http://openpreservation.org/blog/2017/01/04/breaking-waves-and-some-flacs/

Main outcome: better stick with good old Shntool! JHOVE turns out to be useless for this kind of thing (which was a surprise to me as well). (Incidentally the blog also goes into detecting broken FLAC files, although that was not the question here.)

Answer 3

Ripcheck is a utility that does this.

Quoting the docs:

"ripcheck" runs a variety of tests on a WAV file, to see if there are potential mistakes that occurred in converting a CD to a WAV file.

[...]

WHY?

This program was written because we'd received some complaints of occasional "pops" at the beginning on some albums at Magnatune. Further research found that most of the albums we released in 2007 had various CD ripping problems. We also found various CDRs burned by our musicians that had small defects in them, probably due to cheap CDR media being used, or the CDR being burnt too quickly.

[...]