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Old .VOC files to Mac OS X

A

AngusB

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 28, 2002
39
0
Washington DC
Hey guys, I recently found an old 3.5 PC disk of mine with some VOC files on it that were short movie audio clips and such. I captured these from VHS to a WIN3.1 (maybe DOS) machine back in 1992 or so. I am trying to convert them from VOC to WAV (or anything) and I am having no luck. I have tried several Windows and DOS conversion programs in VirtualPC, but have only gotten partially there.

I can convert the file to wav, but when I do it sounds sped up about 20X and slowing it down in another program (such as Soundtrack Pro) doesn't work.

Some of the DOS programs I have tried (such as VOC2WAV.exe) reports "Pack Data, Skip) as an error message when converting. It seems like some kind of compression error... Also tried WinAMP to no avail. I can't even find something that can play these files!

On the Mac side, I tried Soundtrack Pro, SOX, VLC, and Quicktime. None of them could even play the file.

Anyone even remotely ever tried anything like this on a Mac, or even some more recent PC WIN 98/XP software.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Angus B
 
If you can't find anything that'll correctly convert the files, try importing the sped up wav into Audacity and then use Effect > Change Speed ... It'll take some fudging to get right but if that doesn't work I'll eat my hat.*

*I don't wear hats.
 
I misspoke.....

The absolute latest version of SoundConverter DOES convert this type of file.
 
I did it!

I was able to convert old .voc to .wav using the sound conversion link. There was a charge for any larger files, but I was able to convert the smaller files for free and add them to my itunes.
 
Looks like there are a few "voc" formats out there. One is the Creative Labs format, which VLC 1.1.9 plays, but there is another that it doesn't.

Anyone have samples? I recently wrote some code that played/converted System 7 sound via Core Audio directly, so I might be interested in giving this format a shot :)
 
I suggest using a little Mac program called SoundHack to fix the broken WAV files. This tool can, among other things, adjust the stored sample rate and bit depth to what they're supposed to be without changing the sound data (i.e. metadata only change).
 
There is another audio file format with the .voc file extension, which is RCA-VOC. RCA-VOC format is used by RCA Digital Voice Recorder, and is totally different from Creative Labs VOC format.

VOC files can contain audio clips, musics, instrument sounds and sound effects that are used with the associated Creative Labs hardware device. The VOC file format is a compressed file format, allowing for a reduction in the size of the audio file.

To play VOC files in popular player software(Windows Media Player, Quick Time, iTunes, etc) and devices(iPod, iPhone, Zune, etc), you need convert them to popular formats such as WAV, MP3, M4A, etc.
 
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