RIFFPad is a viewer (some day to have editing capabilities) for RIFF formatted files. It is a bit rough but I’ve found it to be very useful when working with RIFF files. Common RIFF files are things like WAV, AVI, DirectX resources as well as many Mac file formats.

The RIFF format is a very useful standard binary file format that has been around for a long time and has undergone very little change. In general a RIFF file is a file that is internally made up of ‘chunks’ that have a chunk id, a length and a blob of data. The chunk id is 4 letters encoded into 32 bits. The chunk id types are typically unique to the file type if lower case and globally standardized if upper case.

I’ve run into RIFF files in a number of places that needed decoding. This is a generic utility for viewing the contents of these files.

Users of RIFF file format:

• AIF format, used to store audio on Apple platforms is based on a (little endian) variation of RIFF (*.aif,*.aiff)
• Several Microsoft formats are based on RIFF. (*.wav,*.avi)
• Electronic Arts resource files used in some games. (*.enu) (ie. Ultima Online)
• PNG format image files (*.png and *.mng)
• Color Palette files (*.pal)
• DirectX Media Files (*.cdm;*.dls;*.ffe;*.sgt;*.sty;*.tpl)
• Real Media Files (*rm)

Download:

Links:

FourCC - A good site for general ‘chunk’ format files.