WVE to VOC Converter

WVE is the audio format native to the Psion Series 3 family of personal digital assistants, released by British company Psion PLC beginning in September 1991. These clamshell PDAs included a built-in voice recorder, and all dictation functionality relied on WVE files to store captured sound. Each file begins with the ASCII signature "ALawSoundFile**" followed by a minimal header, then raw A-law encoded audio sampled at 8 kHz — a rate inherited from digital telephony standards. At 8000 bytes per second, a one-minute recording occupies just 480 KB, which was essential given that Psion devices stored data on SRAM cards typically ranging from 128 KB to 2 MB. The A-law encoding provides reasonable speech clarity within these tight storage constraints, prioritizing intelligibility over high-fidelity reproduction. WVE files can be converted to WAV or other modern formats using SoX, Awave Studio, or specialized Psion file utilities. While the format is firmly a product of early-1990s handheld computing, it holds historical significance as one of the first audio recording formats designed for pocket-sized consumer devices. Collectors and researchers studying mobile computing history occasionally encounter WVE files when recovering data from legacy SRAM media.

VOC (Creative Voice) is a digital audio container developed by Creative Technology and introduced alongside the original Sound Blaster card in 1989. It served as the native audio format for the Sound Blaster family during the DOS era, when Creative's hardware dominated PC audio. VOC files are block-based: each file consists of typed data blocks that can carry 8-bit unsigned PCM, 4-bit and 2.6-bit Creative ADPCM, 16-bit signed PCM, as well as A-law and mu-law encoded audio. This block structure also supports silence intervals, repeat loops, and marker points, giving game developers fine-grained control over sound playback. A notable advantage was hardware-level decoding — Sound Blaster cards could play VOC data directly via DMA transfer, freeing the CPU for other tasks in an era when processor cycles were precious. The format saw extensive use in DOS games from id Software, Sierra, and LucasArts. With the rise of Windows and the WAV format, VOC gradually fell out of mainstream use, yet it remains important for retro gaming preservation and for anyone working with vintage PC audio archives.