Question

I’m writing a little program to read a .wav file. According to the wav specs I’ve been looking at:

it looks like the second four bytes are a 4 byte little endian number. I think this means that the least significant byte is the first one, byte number 5, so in otherwords, I read them from left to right. From what I’ve been reading, I think I should multiply them like this:

n=bytearray[5]+(bytearray[6]*256)+(bytearray[7]*256)+(bytearray[8]*16777216)

so byte in

but that comes out to a pretty damn large number, 1,459,618,138 in decimal for a file that is only 90k long. So I think I’m making a mistake here somewhere.

for the other numbers, if I understand the difference between little endian and big endian is right to left vs left to right order of the bytes?

Answer 1

The array is indexed from 0, so the bytes you want are 4, 5, 6 and 7:

n=bytearray[4]+(bytearray[5]*256)+(bytearray[6]*65536)+(bytearray[7]*16777216)

(Note that your third multiplier needs to be 65536, not 256.)