Java's sound API doesn't work with all .WAV files?

Question

I am currently having trouble playing around with the javax.sound.sampled library. Here\'s the MCV code that I use to play my audio files:

import ja         


        

Answer 1

You can use the following code to get a list of the supported formats for playback:

public static List<AudioFormat> getSupportedAudioFormats() {
    List<AudioFormat> result = new ArrayList<>();
    for (Line.Info info : AudioSystem.getSourceLineInfo(
                new Line.Info(SourceDataLine.class))) {
        if (info instanceof SourceDataLine.Info) {
            Collections.addAll(result, ((SourceDataLine.Info) info).getFormats());
        }
    }
    return result;
}

AudioFormat.Encoding lists the encodings supported by javax.sound.sampled.

A safe WAV audio format is 16-bit PCM at 44100Hz.

You can discover the format of a particular file with:

File file = new File("path_to_file.wav");
AudioFormat fmt = AudioSystem.getAudioFileFormat(file).getFormat();

This will be a little more lenient than trying to get a line for example, but it will still throw if the WAV file has e.g. mp3 data. A WAV file is a container that can store encodings beyond PCM, some of which javax.sound.sampled does not normally support.

Answer 2

If you look up UnsupportedAudioFileException, you'll notice that it is thrown when a file is either of an unsupported type, or of an unsupported format. The format is what's getting you.

Java Sound is capable of a variety of different formats, but which ones specifically are generally system dependent. You can find out which formats are supported with:

DataLine.Info.getFormats();

This method returns an array of AudioFormat objects, each of which describes an audio language that your Java implementation can speak.

Given that you can play the files on other players, it is likely that some part of your system is perfectly capable of understanding each of the wav formats; but you might consider checking on which data line it is being fed through, as that hardly means that they are universally supported.