From Newsgroup: comp.sys.acorn.programmer

In article <103evcp$27cdp$1@dont-email.me>,
druck <news@druck.org.uk> wrote:

On 19/06/2025 10:23, Jean-Michel wrote:

From DDE.Codestds.AOF
There are two sorts of AOF: <little-endian> and <big-endian>.

In little-endian AOF, the least significant byte of a word or
half-word has the lowest address of any byte in the (half-)word.
This <byte sex> is used by DEC,Intel and Acorn, amongst others.

In big-endian AOF, the most significant byte of a (half-)word has
the lowest.address. This byte sex is used by IBM, Motorola and
Apple, amongst others.

Never seen a big endian AOF in the wild, and suspect no-one else
has either.

I can only guess it was specified as a result of Sam Wauchope's
crazed ideas about running a successor to RISC OS on Power PC or
something.

At first sight there is a strangeness to the data inside flac music
files. They appear to use both big and little endian vaules which
they do in a way and they don't at the same time. They often use the
hi-byte for flags and blockid purposes.

Here is the start of a flac file...

0000 fLaC
0004 [00][00][00][22] (low byte last Big-endian)
0008 <34 bytes of data for STREAMINFO BLOCK>

002A [04][00][02][B7] <= 04 says vorbis comment not last block,
length = &02B7 (low byte last)
002E [20][00][00][00]reference libFLAC 1.2.1 20070917
(low byte first)
0032 [16][00][00][00] <= number of items in list

But also in the same file..

[0E][00][00][00]TOTALTRACKS=28
[0C][00][00][00]TOTALDISCS=2
[26][00][00][00]TITLE=Third Movement (Cellos & Basses)
[14][00][00][00]ARTIST=Gustav Mahler
[2C][00][00][00]ALBUM=Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection" [Kaplan]
[09][00][00][00]DATE=1988

These are actual values taken from a flac track.

Bob.

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