core audio - How to manually convert 8.24-bit deinterleaved lpcm to 16-bit lpcm?

Question

I have a chunk of data (void*) which is 2 ch, 44100 Hz, 'lpcm' 8.24-bit little-endian signed integer, deinterleaved. I need to record that chunk to a file as 2 ch, 44100 Hz, 'lpcm' 16-bit little-endian signed integer.

How do I convert data? I can imagine I need to do something like this:

uint dataByteSize = sizeof(UInt32) * samplesCount;
UInt32* source = ...;
UInt32* dest = (UInt32*)malloc(dataByteSize);
for (int i = 0; i < samplesCount; ++i) {
    UInt32 sourceSample = source[i];
    UInt32 destSample = sourceSample>>24;
    dest[i] = destSample;
}

But how do I convert deinterleaved to interleaved?

Answer 1

Ok, I've spent some time investigating the issue and realized that question contains too few information to be answered =) So heres the deal:

First, about non-interleaved: I initially thought that it would look like this: l1 l2 l3 l4...ln r1 r2 r3 r4...rn But it turned out that in my data right channel was just missing. It turned out that it wasn't a non-interleaved data, it was just a plain mono data. And yes, it should always be multiple buffers in case data is actually non-interleaved. If it's interleaved, it should be l1 r1 l2 r2 l3 r3 l4 r4...

Second, about actual transformation: it all depends on the range of samples. In my case (and in any case where core audio is involved if I'm correct) fixed-point 8.24 values should range between (-1, 1), while 16-bit signed values should range between (-32768, 32767). So 8.24 value will always have its first 8 bits set either to 0 (in case it is positive) or to 1 (in case it is negative). This first 8 bits should be removed (preserving sign ofc). Also you can remove as many trailing bits as you want - it'll just reduce quility of the sound, but it wont ruin the sound. In case of converting to 16 bits signed format, bits 8-22 (15 bits that is) will actually contain the data we need to use for SInt16. Bit 7 can be used as the sign bit. So to convert 8.24 to SInt16 you just need to shift 9 bits right (9 because you need to preserve the sign) and cast to SInt16

11111111 10110110 11101110 10000011 - > 11111111 11111111 (11011011 01110111)
00000000 01101111 00000000 11000001 - > 00000000 00000000 (00110111 10000000)

That's it. Nothing more then iterating through array and shifting bits right. Hope that's gonna save someone couple of hours.