One of my favorite legacy formats to explore is any type of multimedia CD-ROM. The 1990’s and early 2000’s were filled with all sorts of multimedia for CD, Web, and Television. It is also one of the most difficult formats to try and preserve for the future. Many CD-ROM’s are filled with executables and/or Macromedia Director media, later having flash content. The operating systems and security needs today make playback almost impossible. For this reason many have built emulation services to mimic the original operation system and software to allow the many historic multimedia CD-ROM’s to once again interact with the user in a way many current systems still struggle with.
Many CD-ROM’s would come as Hybrid disc’s allowing them to be used on a Windows and Macintosh system, sometimes providing two different experiences. Then there were CD-Extra or Enhanced CD‘s as a separate session to an Audio CD which would contain bonus content playable only on a computer.
For fun I took a look back at some of my older Audio CD titles. I came across a couple, one claiming to be a “CD-Extra” and another an “Enhanced CD“. The CD-Extra disc when queried with cd-info claimed to have 12 tracks, with the 12th being a data XA track.
Disc mode is listed as: CD-ROM Mixed CD-ROM Track List (1 - 12) #: MSF LSN Type Green? Copy? Channels Premphasis? 1: 00:02:00 000000 audio false no 2 no 2: 02:13:66 009891 audio false no 2 no 3: 05:21:28 023953 audio false no 2 no 4: 08:18:19 037219 audio false no 2 no 5: 12:28:37 055987 audio false no 2 no 6: 16:11:58 072733 audio false no 2 no 7: 19:21:56 086981 audio false no 2 no 8: 23:17:49 104674 audio false no 2 no 9: 26:01:17 116942 audio false no 2 no 10: 28:30:02 128102 audio false no 2 no 11: 31:07:70 139945 audio false no 2 no 12: 37:29:46 168571 XA true no 170: 51:35:07 231982 leadout (520 MB raw, 516 MB formatted) CD Analysis Report CD-Plus/Extra session #2 starts at track 12, LSN: 168571
Mounting the 12th track showed a mix of Macromedia Director (.DIR) files and quite a few Quicktime MOV movies. Playback was not possible on my current computer so I had to resort to using an emulator to experience this bonus content, full of band member photos and biographies.
The other disc I pulled out to explore was a bit different. Using cd-info the disc looked very similar:
Disc mode is listed as: CD-ROM Mixed CD-ROM Track List (1 - 13) #: MSF LSN Type Green? Copy? Channels Premphasis? 1: 00:02:00 000000 audio false no 2 no 2: 04:20:08 019358 audio false no 2 no 3: 08:04:27 036177 audio false no 2 no 4: 11:15:62 050537 audio false no 2 no 5: 14:54:32 066932 audio false no 2 no 6: 19:57:73 089698 audio false no 2 no 7: 26:12:36 117786 audio false no 2 no 8: 29:51:59 134234 audio false no 2 no 9: 34:44:00 156150 audio false no 2 no 10: 39:36:62 178112 audio false no 2 no 11: 42:06:01 189301 audio false no 2 no 12: 45:42:26 205526 audio false no 2 no 13: 57:10:54 257154 XA true no 170: 72:56:67 328117 leadout (735 MB raw, 730 MB formatted) CD Analysis Report CD-Plus/Extra session #2 starts at track 13, LSN: 257154
The disc’s, even though were labeled CD-Extra and Enhanced CD, had the same structure and format. The difference was in the type of multimedia used. There was a simple application which launched Quicktime and loaded a single MOV movie. But, this was not your regular Quicktime Movie, this is a highly complex Interactive Quicktime movie.
The Quicktime movie could only be launched from an older operating system using Quicktime 6, and on the Macintosh, only a PPC CPU. The movie would launch with an interactive menu, allowing navigation as you might find on a DVD or Flash website, but all within a single MOV file. When I ran MediaInfo on the MOV file I got back quite a few tracks:
Ten video tracks and 51 other tracks. Exploring with Quicktime, I could see the entire list of embedded content:
Quicktime movies, an Audio track, dozens of Flash, Photos, Animations, Sprites, with the possibility of more. These types of Quicktime files had requirements in order to run with Quicktime 6 being the last which could playback all the content correctly. Current versions of Quicktime give a warning on the lack of compatibility.
This Interactive Quicktime movie proudly claims; “Made with LiveStage Pro“, which was an authoring environment for Quicktime made by Totally Hip Software Inc. Started in 1995, but seemed to disappear after 2004 with no new development and by 2014 the website went offline.
If you would like to see a couple of Apple created simple examples see here.
LiveStage Pro was a very powerful authoring tool in its time, another similar tool called Electrifier competed for the interactive Quicktime market. Adobe GoLive also competed, but offered fewer features. The final Quicktime movie exported from LiveStage Pro was the main component, but the software did save a project format with the extension “LSD”. Versions 2 through 4 of LiveStage Pro had a similar header.
All the samples from version 2 through 4 have the first four bytes as “LSAF“. It also seems the next four bytes may be version related. Version 1 however has a different header.
Identification of a LiveStage project should be simple enough, but identifying and rendering back a Quicktime movie made by this software takes some work. In fact there are many “Enhanced CD’s” and CD-Extra titles out there with quite a few system requirements. If we are not careful, many of these little gems might get more difficult to experience or lost completely.
If you would like to explore the Quicktime Movie from the Enhanced CD mentioned here, send me a message. You can also take a look at my signature proposal and samples files on my Github for LiveStage.
I have used and have researched a lot of audio editing software. Some are very simple and straightforward, others are feature rich and take some time to learn. While looking in a format, I came across some Audio software which nothing like I have used before. At first I was confused, I figured it would be simple to open a certain file format and play the audio. Not so fast.
Max is software which proudly says it is an, “infinitely flexible space to create your own interactive software”. Created by Cycling ’74 software, Max has been around for awhile, being developed in the mid 1980’s. It allows the user to make “patches” stringing around components and effects to accomplish an infinite amount of options and outcomes.
The software produces simple project files and patch files, but hey are just JSON data, at least in the latest version. But when working with audio files the software can save to a number of formats.
One of the options is a format called “SDIF”, which stands for “Sound Description Interchange Format“. SDIF was jointly developed by IRCAM and CNMAT, with proposals starting back in the mid-1990’s. Originally written as a Spectral Description, it was later changed to refer to a Sound Description.
The Specification states the general idea was to “store information related to signal processing and specifically of sound, in files, according to a common format to all data types. Thus, it is possible to store results or parameters of analyses, syntheses…” So not exactly the same as a simple WAVE file you can open and edit, this format was meant to store signal data for analysis.
Each SDIF file consists of a header and then an overall a succession of frames, not unlike chunks in the IFF/AIFF/RIFF formats, ordered in time. Each frame matrix declares a “Type” which can be a combination of many options. Lets take a look at a SDIF file:
This test file has the opening frame “SDIF“, to identify it as an SDIF, then a reference to the type “1TRC“. I would try and explain a Matrix 1TRC Sinusoidal Track, but I have no idea what it means. Something, something sine wave, etc. Someone much smarter than me can make use of this format. Here are a couple examples of SDIF with other frame types.
Unfortunately, the common tools I use to explore AV formats don’t seem to work on this format. MediaInfo, FFProbe, Exiftool, all give me unknown file warnings. So I had to compile the SDIF software in order to get some details.
querysdif angry_cat.part.sdif Header info of file angry_cat.part.sdif:
Data in file angry_cat.part.sdif (9504872 bytes): 1933 1TRC frames in stream 0 between time 0.000000 and 5.794875 containing 1933 1TRC matrices with 45 --400 rows, 4 -- 4 columns
An interesting thing is that a SDIF file can be in text form as well.
An interesting format for sure. But wait, there is more!
My initial interest in this format was when I was given access to a set of MUBU files. I was unclear on how there were created at first and it took me down a long path of learning about SDIF and the Max software from Cycling ’74 and IRCAM. MUBU turns out to be a toolbox for Max which adds more analysis features.
MUBU stands for MUlti-BUffer, which helps overcome some limitations. It is actually a container using the SDIF standard. Lets take a look.
hexdump -C test.mubu | head 00000000 53 44 49 46 00 00 00 08 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 01 |SDIF............| 00000010 31 4e 56 54 00 00 00 78 ff ef ff ff ff ff ff ff |1NVT...x........| 00000020 ff ff ff fd 00 00 00 01 31 4e 56 54 00 00 03 01 |........1NVT....| 00000030 00 00 00 53 00 00 00 01 4d 75 42 75 2e 43 6f 6e |...S....MuBu.Con| 00000040 74 61 69 6e 65 72 2e 4e 75 6d 54 72 61 63 6b 73 |tainer.NumTracks| 00000050 09 31 0a 4d 75 42 75 2e 43 6f 6e 74 61 69 6e 65 |.1.MuBu.Containe| 00000060 72 2e 56 65 72 73 69 6f 6e 09 31 2e 35 0a 4d 75 |r.Version.1.5.Mu| 00000070 42 75 2e 43 6f 6e 74 61 69 6e 65 72 2e 4e 75 6d |Bu.Container.Num| 00000080 42 75 66 66 65 72 73 09 31 0a 00 00 00 00 00 00 |Buffers.1.......| 00000090 31 4e 56 54 00 00 00 38 ff ef ff ff ff ff ff ff |1NVT...8........|
A MUBU file has the same SDIF frame header, but also include a “1NVT” frame, which is a Name Value Table. This is where the MUBU container is referenced. The MuBu file has its own structure:
If I query the MuBu file like I did the SDIF, I get the following:
querysdif test.mubu Header info of file test.mubu:
Data in file test.mubu (3741392 bytes): 77929 M000 frames in stream 0 between time 0.000000 and 1.623500 containing 77929 M000 matrices with 2 -- 2 rows, 1 -- 1 columns
The MuBu file contains one audio track and one buffer. This is a simple test file, but MuBu files can be quite large with multiple tracks.
Working with the Max software or OpenMusic is not something I found to be easy to understand. I am sure if I was more musically inclined and with a little practice I could make some of this work. For the time being, a signature to identify a SDIF and MUBU will have to do. Check out the GitHub for my proposed signature and a couple examples.
The 1990’s was an amazing time for multimedia. Compared to what is possible today, the graphics were more simple but there were many software titles leading the charge in Animation. Macromedia Director, along with Flash, dominated the interactive multimedia market for quite some time. Eventually being picked up by Adobe and discontinued in 2013. Quite a few multimedia disc’s out there were built using Director.
Competing with Director, another company had a strong product. Motion Works International was an early pioneer in the multimedia CD-ROM scene. Rumor has it, Motion Works was started by a 12 year old. Motion Works had been making software for use with the highly successful HyperCard software since 1988. In 1992 they released the successor to their ADDmotion software, a path based animation tool called PROmotion.
PROmotion was used with with many Multimedia titles, some in cooperation with the Corel Home series. In addition to commercial titles PROmotion was a great tool for the creation of animation clips and other marketing material. I came across some stand-alone marketing files for old scriptwriting software called ScriptWare. When I unarchived the HQX file and Installed the Demo, I was presented with a set of files with the .MW extension.
Looking at the files in the directory with their extended attributes I can see all the .MW files have no data fork (0 bytes), only a resource fork. This is common for any Application on the MacOS systems prior to MacOS X. At first the MW extension made me thing of MacWrite, but launching one of these MW files brought up an interactive menu. The type being APPL, which is Application.
What I thought would be a demo of the application Scriptware was actually interactive animations demonstrating the software. By dumping the resource fork of one of the MW files I found some information which helped me know what software created these interactive demos.
Makes sense, MW stood for “Motion Works”. ADDmotion was another software title developed by Motion Works, most will remember it as an add-on for Hypercard for adding animation to stacks. These MW files are created using PROmotion and exporting them as a stand-alone animation which includes the “AM Viewer” built in. A regular PROmotion file, however, did not include a viewer and requires the software in order to open and run.
The files do have a Type/Creator code of “ADDm”, but with no data fork, identification through standard means is not possible. They also do not have the “vers” string to help identify them within the Resource Fork. Since standard methods of identification are impossible, I hope in the future there will be more tools available to read the Type/Creator codes while on the Mac, or in a disk image, or within a container and return back the Software which created the file and the file type.
The products from Motion Works where significantly cheaper than animation tools such as Director, but were still pretty powerful for its day. I was surprised when I found the company didn’t last much longer than 1998 before disappearing. There are probably many stories like PROmotion, coming onto the scene with new and exciting features before thought impossible only to die out as other tools dominate the market.
If you are interested in looking at the files yourself, here is a link to some original files, and the same files encoded in MacBinary.
During a recent review of some help files for some older Final Draft software I came across this Q&A.
Needless to say, I was intrigued, but let me give you a pro tip. Googling MovieMagic and “SEX” does not bring back results related to file formats. Also, probably best not to search at work.
Movie Magic refers to software developed by Write Brothers/Screenplay. The main software, Screenwriter is a word processor built specifically for writing screen plays for TV, Movies, theater, etc. The software was first developed in 1983 and quickly replaced typewriters as the favorite for writing the very specific formatting required by screenplays.
Screenwriter version 6 uses the extension MMSW and DEF for templates. Let’s have a look at one under the hood.
The header is easy to interpret, Version 6 is the latest version of the software. The rest of the file is non-human readable binary so not much to look at. The screenplay website has a chart for figuring out compatibility for all the versions and extensions.
Files from the earlier version appear to be structured the same way. Although files generated on a Macintosh still seem to retain the “win” in the header, but with a capital “Win” and “Ver”. Looking at the older ScriptThing format it is similar.
Screenwriting software is very specialized, the formatting is important as well as keeping track of characters, locations, props, etc. An important part of filming a movie based on a script is to schedule the different scenes and which characters are needed for each scene. This scheduling can be generated by generating a Scheduling EXport. Not sure who decided on this extension, but there it is.
Scheduling Export files begin with “SSI“, which I assume refers to Screenplay Systems, Inc. They begin with listing all the different things which need scheduling in plain text. In Screenwriter 6 there are a couple of export types with the same extension. One called Gorilla Scheduling and another called CompanyMOVE ShowPlanner, but both are identical to the Movie Magic file, so I am not quite sure their purpose. Maybe there would be more to discern from a whole script instead of the simple samples I made for this purpose.
This was a fun format to research, although I had to be careful of the terms I used! You can check out my proposed signatures and samples on my GitHub.
Music notation software is among the earliest software for desktop computers. SCORE in 1987, Finale came around in 1988, Capella in 1992, and Sibelius in 1993. Many others came and went during this time. Music notation software was so much more than the typical word processing or desktop publishing system. Specialized fonts were needed to display the music notation and there are many other variables for different instruments allowing individuals and others the ability to create complicated compositions in an inexpensive way.
Sibelius[SI] + [BAY] + [LEE] + [UHS] was originally developed for the Acorn system in 1986, then released on Windows and Macintosh in 1998-99. The software became very popular and in 2006 was purchased by the software giant AVID. The software was used enough to get a preservation assessment by the British Library in 2017 and draft status format description by the Library of Congress, written by the amazing Ashley!
Both reviews of the format emphasize the proprietary nature of the file format which has been used since the early versions. Aside from the early Acorn release, the Windows and Macintosh versions used a binary format with the SIB extension. They are actually quite easy to identify.
This is exactly how PRONOM and other identification methods determine they are Sibelius files. PRONOM has assigned the format fmt/696 and is looking for the hexadecimal bytes 0F534942454C495553.
The problem with this identification method is that all the Sibelius files are identified as such, regardless of version. As mentioned by Ashley, version of the software used is highly important as new features were added all the time making backwards compatibility difficult. Add in the fact that there were different releases for each version which would limit these features even more and I can see how a musician could get very frustrated. If you created a score in Sibelius 5 and tried to open in Sibelius 5 Student version, you may find your composition lacking in many ways. The only way to avoid compatibility issues is to always open in the latest “Ultimate” version. Sibelius Ultimate can open all versions of the SIB format back to version 2. The software even has an export feature which allows you to export back to a previous version stripping what is necessary to ensure compatibility.
For those with a bunch of SIB files in their archives, how would you know which software version created the file? Well lets take a closer look at the bytes and see if we can find some patterns. Let it be known, I am not reverse engineering the format, just looking for patterns which will allow for proper identification!
I am not the first person to ask this question, many others want to know the versions of their SIB files. Thankfully others have found some clues on which bytes hold the version information. It seems we can determine the version based on 4 bytes shortly after the SIBELIUS string. Specifically bytes 10-13.
That is a lot of versions and I feel there may be some gaps that still need to be identified. It appears that the first two bytes are the major version and the second set of bytes is the minor version. Although it looks like a few major version bytes span across a few software versions. With this chart, one could be very specific in identifying which Sibelius version wrote the file, but for archiving purposes it seems we can group many of these capturing just the major version. The export screenshot above seems to have broken down significant changes and grouped similar formats together, the biggest being 8.6 through 2019.12. A comparison of “student” and “first” formats don’t have any obvious bytes which indicate as such, so for now they are all lumped together.
There is one other similar format which needs to be mentioned. Sibelius Scorch was a product made to share scores online. This has been replaced with Sibelius Cloud Publishing, but for awhile was the best way to share a score with others in a way that protected the original. I have no idea how they were made, but sites like scorestreet.net and sibeliusmusic.com were sites you could upload your score to for sharing. Some SCO files appear to have a PDF embedded within them for proper printing.
I am not sure the best way to handle all the different versions within the PRONOM registry. I went ahead and made a few signatures based on the export dialog of Sibelius 2024. Even with combining a few together, it leaves us with 17 new PUID’s. Maybe further discussion can refine these down a bit more? Regardless, each file can be associated with a specific Sibelius version, making it easier to open and migrate if needed without fear of opening in the wrong version. Take a look at some samples and my signatures on my GitHub page and let me know if there is a better way.
I was recently going through some of my old CD-R’s and came across this 11 year old fun memory.
I remember going to this 2003 Toad the Wet Sprocket concert in Salt Lake City with some friends, I had seen this band perform before, but this was the first time I was able to get a recording of the show. Normally having a recording of a concert of a well known band was a little shady, but for some bands, they not only allow recording of their live concerts, but they encourage it. There has been a few bands over the years who have this philosophy, one most have heard of is the Grateful Dead, because of all the tape trading, the band’s numerous concerts will live on forever.
The scene of recording concerts is still alive and well, and if you are into recording and sharing it is expected you share in a lossless audio format. The world of lossless audio is definitely in the minority of all those who listen to music on the daily. Most of us have been placated with the infinite playlists on services like Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music. Most probably don’t care about owning music anymore, but for the few who consider themselves Audiophiles, having a lossless audio file is the only choice.
When it comes to formats, there are a few lossless formats to choose from, they all come with some advantages as well as some downsides. WAV files contain the full PCM audio stream, and while internet bandwidth today can handle full uncompressed audio, it can still be beneficial to use some compression for archiving or sharing over the web.
The most common lossless format today is the Free Lossless Audio Codec or FLAC, but there are also quite a few who like the Apple Lossless Audio Codec. Both offer many advantages, especially with metadata, cuesheets, and can contain cover album art. But many years ago another lossless format was most often used with bootleg recordings and audio sharing.
Shorten was one of the first lossless formats, developed by Tony Robinson in 1993 for SoftSound. It could cut the size in half of a typical 16-bit WAV file. It achieved this by using Huffman coding, kinda the same way a JPEG works, by reducing the frequency of how often patterns occur. Today FLAC and ALAC have replaced this format and offer improved features and support. Many audio players have dropped support for shorten making it difficult to use this old format.
The Shorten format uses the .SHN extension. It is one of the formats listed on the Library of Congress Sustainability of Digital Formats with the ID fdd000199, although a couple links don’t appear to work as it hasn’t been updated since 2011. Support was ended for this format and many of the links found on various websites are for broken, usually referencing the etree wiki. Much of which is archived on the Internet Archive.
Let’s take a look at the what makes up a lossless compressed SHN file. A quick look at a sample header:
The first four bytes seem to be consistent among my samples. It makes me wonder if the ascii values have something to do with the author, Anthony (Tony) J. Robinson. In the source code for the shorten software, the file shorten.h defines the ascii “ajkg” as the magic header for the SHN format. Also found in current ffmpeg code. Although the tools don’t have much to say about them.
mediainfo test.shn
General
Complete name : test.shn
Format : Shorten
Format version : 2
File size : 3.17 MiB
Audio
Format : Shorten
Compression mode : Lossless
ffprobe -i test.shn
Input #0, shn, from 'test.shn':
Duration: N/A, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
Stream #0:0: Audio: shorten, 44100 Hz, 2 channels, s16p
Using the older SHNTOOL, we can get more information.
shntool info test.shn
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
File name: test.shn
Handled by: shn format module
Length: 0:32.23
WAVE format: 0x0001 (Microsoft PCM)
Channels: 2
Bits/sample: 16
Samples/sec: 44100
Average bytes/sec: 176400
Rate (calculated): 176400
Block align: 4
Header size: 44 bytes
Data size: 5697720 bytes
Chunk size: 5697756 bytes
Total size (chunk size + 8): 5697764 bytes
Actual file size: 3325489
File is compressed: yes
Compression ratio: 0.5836
CD-quality properties:
CD quality: yes
Cut on sector boundary: no
Sector misalignment: 1176 bytes
Long enough to be burned: yes
WAVE properties:
Non-canonical header: no
Extra RIFF chunks: no
Possible problems:
File contains ID3v2 tag: no
Data chunk block-aligned: yes
Inconsistent header: no
File probably truncated: unknown
Junk appended to file: unknown
Odd data size has pad byte: n/a
Extra shn-specific info:
Seekable: yes
Many Shorten Audio Files are found out there in archives and file sharing sites, so even though the format isn’t used to create new files, it will still be around for awhile. My GitHub has my signature proposal and a couple of samples.
When it comes to design software there were many options over the years, many being released with a lot of hype and others disappearing not long after they released. There are few which lasted long enough to not be gobbled up by big names such as Adobe. One of those is Canvas by Deneba Systems.
First released in 1987, it is still available over at Canvas GFX. It’s amazing it was never bought by one of the big names, Adobe, Corel, Aldus, etc and remained under Deneba Systems until 2003 when it was bought by ACD Systems, but kept the name Deneba Canvas for a time. The later versions were not popular to all, and Mac support was dropped, but the software continued. Awhile back I was looking through a few of my old ZIP disks and found some software my father used in the mid 1980’s. He had a copy of Canvas version 2 for Macintosh. At that time I was more interested in playing games on our family’s Macintosh 128k than using design software.
Over the years I have come across many Canvas documents. With each version released, changes were made to the file format used to store the drawings and artwork. There were many file format changes as well as the extensions used with each version. Some are easily identifiable and others have some confusing structures. Lets look into it.
Version
Platform
Extension
Description
Canvas 1-3 & artWORKS
Macintosh
none
no strong pattern
Canvas 3.5
Mac & Windows
CVS
Similar to v1-3
Canvas 5
Mac & Windows
CV5
CANVAS5 string
Canvas 6-8
Mac & Windows
CNV
CANVAS6 string
Canvas 9-X
Mac & Windows
CVX
Similar to 6-8
Canvas Draw
Mac
CVD
Different than others
Canvas Image File
CVI
DAD5PROX
The first three versions of Canvas were Macintosh only and in those early days there was no extension, just a Type / Creator indicating to the Finder how to open them. Deneba Systems used the Creator codes DAD2, DAD5, through DADX.
The first versions are quite frustrating. I have gathered samples from Version 2, 3, 3.5 and artWORKS version 1. Even with numerous samples, there are no patterns I can discern from them. I even reached out to the current CanvasX technical support for answers. They wanted to be helpful, but their answers didn’t offer much help.
With “CVS” or ‘drw2’ for mac, the header contains ranges inside a structure, and other data like if it was compressed. When we see if it’s a valid file we check the ranges. There is no easy way to determine what hex values would be written because of flipping, Intel vs (PPC or 68K). Unfortunately, the research needed to identify the Hex value will require the original code for version 3.5 which we do not have access to easily. Canvas 3.5 code is 16 bit… this would also be an issue.
In the version 2 & 3 samples you can see some patterns, which I thought would allow for proper identification, but looking at more samples I found differences. One pattern I was hopeful might be consistent was the hex values “002000400060008000C00140018001C002400280”, but there are some which don’t match this pattern. If the file is truly compressed, it will be hard to know which values would be consistent among all files. I have over 8,000 samples and have a signature that only excludes around 20, so it will have to do for now.
When we start with Version 5 we get into some more identifiable headers, there is some oddness with some samples. But with an ascii string like “CANVAS5”, it should be easy, right? Not so fast, in version 5 you can compress the file structure. This removes the easily identifiable “CANVAS5” string. But some have a small string at the tail end, but others do not.
Canvas 6 uses a new extension, but has a similar structure to the file format. With compression as an option. But some of the compressed files on Windows has a reversed string, “5VNC“. So many Canvas 5 compressed look identical to Canvas 6 compressed, complicating identification.
While most have the “CANVAS6” string near the beginning, quite a few are missing the CNV5/5VNC string at the end. Instead, many have the string “%SI-0200” near the end, which I use in my signature suggestion. This structure remained the same from version 6 to 8.
In version 9 and forward we have an extension change to CVX, but the format is similar with the “CANVAS6” string, but is a slightly different offset. It is still used with the current version of Canvas X.
This collection of file formats is very hard to make sense of. Some really great consistent patterns on many samples, with lots of exceptions. Super confusing. This software has had a long run, with the latter years staying pretty stagnate in terms of new development. It is worth defining and creating a signature for the consistent patterns, then we can dial in the variants over time?
The signatures I have built miss about 23 files in versions 1-3 out of the ~9000 samples I have and for Canvas 5, only some of the compressed files are currently not identified. But so far all my CNV and CVX files identify correctly, so probably good for now.
CanvasX dropped supported for the Macintosh, but did release an entirely different product called Canvas X Draw, which does support the Macintosh. Here is what a CVD file looks like:
There is also the matter of a Canvas Image, which the User Guide calls proxy images. They are Raster images used in placements within Canvas Documents. Should be easy to identify.
Phew, if you held on for this whole post you must really like confusing file format structures. This format has been on my mind on and off for about 6 years. Hopefully these signatures will work for the vast majority of the Canvas files found in archives and personal systems. As always here is my GitHub with the signatures I am proposing and a few samples to get you confused.
There are probably many reasons why a software developer might want to create a proprietary format to store their files in. The software may require special features that don’t fit into an existing format. I would hope a developer would try to use existing formats, or even better open formats, but for many reasons, which probably include profits, they choose to re-invent the wheel often.
MAGIX is a German company which started making software in 1994. In 2001 they developed their first video editing software which was called Movie Edit Pro. The software seems to be well received and is still in use today.
Like most video editing software, project files are used to store all the edits and links to video files. These are usually smaller text based, with many using XML as the project format. Not MAGIX, they decided to go with a different yet known format for their project files.
Yes, they used the RIFF container format for their projects. Seems an odd choice, especially for video production although it is well suited for it. AVI is another video format which uses the RIFF container. The MVP project file uses the ID SEKD with the format MVPH. Earlier versions of Movie Edit Pro used a different extension.
The MVD format used on an earlier version of Movie Edit Pro is also a RIFF, and with the ID of SEKD, but has a format of SVIP.
RIFFpad can break down the chunks we see in an MVP file. Each of the LIST chunks has their own subchunks as well. I assume this his how the editing software stores each video/audio track references, etc. So I give it to MAGIX for at least using an understandable format to store their projects.
MAGIX has also used RIFF in many of its supporting formats. So far I have found mfx, afx, ifx, cfx, ctf, tfx, ufx, mmt, mmm, hdp, each having their own format:
Not sure the best way to manage all of these in terms of identification, as I am not sure what what is the purpose of each format. Maybe for now I’ll make a generic to catch them all as a MAGIX File.
Extension
ID
FORMAT
AFX
SEKD
SAFX
CFX
SEKD
SCFX
CTF
SEKD
SVIP
HDP
SEKD
SHDP
IFX
SEKD
SIFX
MFX
SEKD
MAFX
MMM
SEKD
SVIP
MMT
SEKD
SVIP
MVD
SEKD
SVIP
MVP
SEKD
MVPH
MXM
MXMD
mxmi
TFX
SEKD
STFX
UFX
SEKD
SVIP
But, when it comes to their proprietary MAGIX Video format, I think they may have pushed things a little too far. Meet the MXV format:
I am not sure what I am looking at, is it a RIFF? Is it a RIFF variant like RF64? MAGIX claims the format is:
This is the MAGIX video format for quicker processing with MAGIX products. It offers very low loss of quality, but it cannot be played via conventional DVD players.
A look around the internet doesn’t bring much up in reference to this format. Just my recent page on the format wiki. A search for MXRIFF64 bring up nothing. But a closer look at other strings within the MXV file reveal we are probably looking at some sort of MPEG format.
I was able to locate a project on GitHub which claims to be able to demux the MXV format. The software is written in GO and appears to indicate this format is chunked based and has most of the chunks figured out. So if you find yourself stuck with some MXV files and don’t want to use the latest from MAGIX, this might be the tool for you.
This demuxer also has an interesting file you can download. It is called a “GRAMMAR” file and can be loaded into hex viewers like Synalyze It! can show the parts of a file you load. Its a great way to explore a format!
None of these formats are found in PRONOM, project files are not usually kept in archives, but if would be good to know about the RIFF files if they do turn up. The video format is for sure something the archival world should know about. MediaInfo is currently not aware of this format, but seems like it might be an easy task.
As usual, you can see some samples and my proposal signatures on my GitHub.
In honor of #Marchintosh, I threatened in an earlier post to discuss The Writing Center, one of the many writing programs marketed by the Learning Company for the Mac. This one was developed by Datapak Software, Inc and I think they wanted to watch the world burn.
This format was different enough from the Student Writing Center and the “Ultimate Writing & Creativity Center” to need its own post. Moreover, I am pretty sure the developers of this software were actively trying to frustrate anyone trying to document the format. Let me explain.
In the early Macintosh world, very rarely were extensions used. Current systems use extensions to link the file to an application which can open the file. On the Mac, the system would use special attributes called Type / Creator codes. These codes were registered with Apple so they would be unique to a specific software and type of file. The codes used the FourCC system and unfortunately Apple never released a full list of codes used. Some folks over the years have tried to document as many as they can. Many used simple understandable codes, for example, A Microsoft Word document has a Type / Creator of W6BN / MSWD. The creator code of MSWD is very readable, and the type code W6BN is unique to a document from version 6 of Microsoft Word.
This Sample Report file from The Writing Center, when investigated with the ResEdit tool show interesting Type / Creator codes. If we look at the hexadecimals values for the codes. The first four bytes are the Type code and the second set of 4 bytes are the Creator code.
The first thing to know is the encoding for all Type / Creator codes is MacRoman, so if we look up the hexadecimal code for “0A” we learn it is the character for a new Line Feed, why in the world would you use the line feed character? The developers must have had a sense of humor, or are psychopaths, and I’m leaning toward the latter. Trying to put this character into any sort of spreadsheet or text based document with other codes throws everything off! When I try and use a spreadsheet with a group of codes and then use a script to look them up on the command line I get crazy formatting. Not to mentioned the second character in the creator code is “1A” which is a substitute character.
This is just one example of crazy characters being used in Type / Creator codes. Stay tuned for more on these in future discussions.
Even though the Type / Creator codes are very useful in identification of this format, often times the Finder attribute is lost. This can happen if the file is moved off an HFS disk, usually a network or through the internet. Then all we have is the binary data fork and a file with no extension. So finding a signature to identify this format is useful.
Looking at the hexadecimal values of the header of a couple samples doesn’t initially look promising, the first few bytes are very different meaning there is no magic bytes at the beginning of the file. In fact the only thing the same is the mention of the Geneva font used in the document. Looking further into the files.
The only bytes I could find near the beginning that seemed semi consistent is the highlighted bytes above. I did however notice some consistent bytes at the end of each of the files.
The four bytes at the end of each file by themselves would not be a good signature as there are many formats which end with a few “FF” sequences. But maybe combined with bytes near the beginning, a signature might be found. I added a couple samples to my Github page if you would like to take a look. In order to retain the extended attributes, I encoded the files as MacBinary.
lsar -L "Sample Report.bin"
Sample Report.bin: MacBinary
Sample Report:
Name: Sample Report
Size: 29.4 KB (29,404 bytes)
Compressed size: 29.4 KB (29,440 bytes)
Last modified: Thursday, July 25, 1991 at 12:58:20 PM
Created: Saturday, October 13, 1990 at 1:10:54 AM
Mac OS type code: ?WP1 (0x0a575031)
Mac OS creator code: ??WP (0x0a1a5750)
Mac OS Finder flags: 0x0100
Index in file: 0
Length of embedded data: 29404
Start of embedded data: 128
Original archive entry: Is an embedded MacBinary file: Yes
I came across another CD-ROM the other day with some fun embroidery formats. It includes the HUS format I recently posted on, plus a few more.
Like I mentioned before, this is a format genre which is not normally seen in the archival world, but is fun to take a peek into the world of embroidery formats. The HUS format from Husqvarna was a unique proprietary format, but looking at another in this set, we see a common container format.
filename : 'CH1604.ofm'
filesize : 25600
modified : 2002-04-29T05:58:26-06:00
errors :
matches :
- ns : 'pronom'
id : 'fmt/111'
format : 'OLE2 Compound Document Format'
version :
mime :
class : 'Text (Structured)'
basis : 'byte match at 0, 30'
First, what is an OFM file? It is the native format for Melco branded embroidery machines. They have been around for a few years. Melco has been around since 1972, but i’m sure the format is much newer. The fact that it is in an OLE container would indicate it was created in the mid 1990’s.
The EdsIV Object seems specific. Looking back at the web archive it looks like EDS IV was software available for the Melco products. In a user manual there are three formats associated with the software:
.CND – Condensed Format
.EXP – Expanded Format
.OFM – Project (Layout format)
The EdsIV Object file is unique and will work well for identification. There also seems to be some common patterns within the file that can further the correct identification.
Currently Melco distributes a different software for use with their embroidery machines. Their DesignShop software also works with the OFM format. Downloading a copy of version 11 and using the trial version I get access to a few OFM sample files. Let’s see if they are the same.
Well that is very different than the earlier example. We can see right away this is a different type of file, in fact the first few bytes tells us this another container format. The Resource Interchange File Format, is used in many various file formats, the most popular are WAVE, AVI, and CorelDRAW. It is a chunk based format and there are a few tools we can use to look closer.
Riffpad can open the file, but claims there is some extra data at the end. It does see four chunks and it gives us the code “OFM8”, which is what identifies this particular RIFF type.
I was also able to get some samples of version 10 of DesignShop and found they are the same OLE container. Also has the same “EdsIV Object” within the container. There is a small paragraph in the EdsIV user manual that indicates there are some versioning within the OFM format.
If you open an EDS III .OFM file and save it, it will be converted into an EDS IV .OFM file, which is no longer readable in EDS III. Files saved in this version of EDS IV cannot be read by previous versions of EDS IV.
This version of EDS IV is capable of producing two types of OFM files. Files saved as “Melco Project File (.ofm)” can only be read with this version or higher versions of EDS IV. Files saved as “Melco Version 2.00 (.ofm)” can be read by any EDS IV user that has version 2.00.006 or higher software.
It never ceases to amaze me how many formats use the Compound Object Container format. Seems like more and more are documented often. For now, I made a signature to identify the OLE and RIFF version of OFM. I’ll keep my eye out for the older EDS III and other related formats. As always, you can find my signatures and a sample file on my GitHub.
