Introduction
8SVX is the sound format of the Commodore Amiga. It was defined by Electronic Arts in 1985 as part of the Interchange File Format (IFF), the same family as the ILBM picture format, and nearly every Amiga program that handled sampled sound read and wrote it. The samples are signed 8-bit values, matching the Amiga’s sound hardware.
Files use .8svx, .svx or the general .iff
extension.
Structure
An 8SVX file is one IFF FORM chunk with the form type
8SVX. Chunks inside it are an ID, a 32-bit big-endian length and the data,
padded to an even length. The voice header VHDR comes first: the number
of samples in the one-shot part and in the repeating part, samples per cycle, the
sample rate, the number of octaves, the compression type (0 for none, 1 for
Fibonacci-delta) and the volume. The BODY chunk holds the samples.
Optional chunks give a name (NAME), author (AUTH),
copyright, annotations, envelopes (ATAK, RLSE) and stereo
channels (CHAN).
0FORM chunk ID, length, form type 8SVX12 bytes12VHDR sample counts, rate, octaves, compression, volume28 bytes…NAME, AUTH, ANNO and other optional chunksvaries…BODY signed 8-bit samplesvaries
Links
Software
- Audacity – free audio editor that imports 8SVX through libsndfile (Windows, macOS, Linux)
- SoX – command-line sound converter that reads and writes 8SVX (Windows, macOS, Linux)
- OpenMPT – free tracker that loads 8SVX files as instrument samples (Windows)
- FFmpeg – command-line tool that decodes 8SVX and converts it to other formats (Windows, macOS, Linux)
Developers
- libsndfile – library that reads and writes 8SVX (C)