Read and write a RIFF (or RIFX)

What is RIFF anyway?

The RIFF file format is an old file format that is used as a container format for WAVE files among other things. Recently I decided that I wanted to write some pure Haskell code that could parse this file format so that I can start working my way towards building audio libraries in pure Haskell.

So you wrote a Haskell RIFF package did you?

Yes. You can view the results of my efforts on hackage: The riff package. You can even view the code on BitBucket if you like.

That package contains:

• The riff library with the following features:
  • The ability to parse both RIFF and RIFX files. (Only perfectly formatted RIFF files are currently supported, we currently have no best effort support)
  • Convenience methods to make parsing / assembling RIFF files easier.
  • Written in pure Haskell so that you can run your code everywhere and be assured by all of the nice type safety that Haskell gives you.
• A riff-structure executable that will print out the structure of all of the riff files that you provide it with.
• A riff-convert executable that will let you convert RIFX files into RIFF files and vice versa.
• A riff-identity executable that is pretty useless for practical purposes (it just makes a clone of the RIFF file you give it) but great for testing the library and it serves as a good code example.
• Complete documentation coverage so that you know how to use each and every method in the library and what the limitations are.

You can give it a try today to read some RIFF files and it is all pretty self explanitory. I hope somebody gets some good use out of this. I am going to try and keep this library small and focused; please feel free to contribute and let me know what you think. And if you use it for something then especially let me know. It would make me very happy.