Hi Geoff - The "#x" and "#y" are meant to suggest just any old arbitrary numbers, although the '#' is required. For instance, to copy track #1 to just after track #5 you would enter "copy #1 #5". If you omit the destination number then the track is duplicated right next to itself. If you then join them, you have the original track concatenated with itself. I guess it needs more of a manual... I promise it will be coming. I need to also define a "gap" which is what separates one track from another. A gap can be automatically detected if you wish (that is the default) and consists of a 100 ms period of identical successive values. That many successive identical values will produce no sound, no matter what the values are, and in all likelihood they are zeros (or might as well be). How many samples that is will depend on the sampling rate, sample size, number of channels, etc., but 100 ms is the basic unit for a "gap" with this package. You may find that a wav file only has one track - no gaps - that will usually be the case. But you can split that trick in two with the command "split #1" in which case it is split in two equal parts. the second argument to "split" is a percent, with the percent sign first (for parsing convenience) so if you want to split off just the first %10 of a long track forspecial consideration, it would be "split #1 %10". Now you have two tracks, but no gap has yet been placed between them. To place a gap of zeros after the first of these two tracks, the command is "zero #1". Saving these two tracks with their intgervening gap will produce a file which when you next read it, will remember how many tracks you created in it. deleting (or "drop"ping) the gap will cause the two tracks to be concatenated when written to a file, so you will not later know anything about the division. The "play" command also takes a track specifyer, such as "play #1" or "play #3" except that now you have two more possibilities. You can say "play *" and hear all the tracks, gaps and all, or you can specify a number of different tracks in any order and hear them that way, as in "play #1 #5 #3 #9" The "plot" command is perhaps the least obvious. It will show you four different statistics calculated for each eighth of a track's duration. The four statistics are "min" and "max" (obvious I hope), "drift" and "swing". The "drift" is simply the ordinary mean of all the sample values. It ought to be zero (or 128 for unsigned bytes) but may have "drifted" away from zero, producing a DC component to the signal. The "swing" is the standard deviation (engineers call it a "root mean square") and is a better index of loudness than the min/max values. Each of these four statistics is shown for eight equal divisions of the track's duration, so you can see how the values progress across the track. I have played with this a lot and find that eight is as many divisions as I can easily grasp at a time. You can always "split" the track and repeat the "plot" on a smaller region, essentially zooming in on it. As for the -e switch, I think you are absolutely right - and I will get rid of that as soon as I get a decent computer to use again! One thing I did not mention is that when you use -m or -w to automatically process a file (as opposed to editing it) it applies the "gain" command to bring the min and max values as close to the limits of the sample size as possible without clipping. Sorry for the incomplete documentation, but thank goodness I put it out there when I did, or it would now be a goner, I'm afraid!!! Hope some of this helps... Chuck.
