[Flexradio] Recorded Wave file format

[Bill Tracey]

Anyone know the design rationale for recording IQ wave files as 
floats?   It looks like the code will playback wave files that are 16 bit 
ints.  I'd think we could code them as 24 bit ints without (significant?) 
loss as that's what the soundcards are feeding us.

Reason for the question is I'm looking at using FLAC (Free Lossless Audio 
Compression - http://flac.sourceforge.net/ ) to compress recorded wave 
files and unfortunately it does not handle wave files encoded as 
floats.   It does apparently handle 24 and 16 bit ints.    It looks like at 
one point PowerSDR recorded wave files as ints as there's at least one 16 
bit int encoded IQ wave file (the Aurora file from the Dayton Demo CD) 
running around in the wild that PowerSDR will playback.

Also, a second question, where in the signal  processing pipe is the data 
being recorded grabbed from -- is it after IQ fixup?   That might explain 
the recording as floats.  Will take a look @ the code and see if I can 
puzzle it out, but would be interested to hear from anyone that knows off 
the top of their head.

Cheers,

Bill (kd5tfd)