U-F(1)

NAME

u-f - convert binary unsigned shorts to floats

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SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
OPTIONS
EXAMPLES
SEE ALSO
AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
BUG REPORTS

SYNOPSIS

u-f [-n | scale] < shorts > floats

u-f reads a stream of machine-native 16-bit unsigned short integers from standard input, converts each value to a single-precision floating point number, and writes the resulting binary floats to standard output.

By default each sample is converted as-is (a scale factor of 1.0). An optional scale factor may be supplied as the only argument to multiply every sample, or the -n flag may be used to normalize the data. Reading from a terminal, supplying more than one argument, or a scale factor of zero is treated as an error and prints a usage message.

This command is deprecated and is scheduled for removal; it prints a deprecation warning on startup. Related converters that read the same binary unsigned-short stream include u-a(1), u-bw(1), and u-d(1).

OPTIONS

-n: Normalize the data, scaling every sample by 1/65536 so that the output values fall roughly between 0.0 and 1.0.
scale: A floating point scale factor multiplied into every sample before it is written. Mutually exclusive with -n. Defaults to 1.0 (no scaling) when omitted.

EXAMPLES

Example 1. Normalize raw 16-bit samples to floating point

u-f -n < samples.u > samples.f

Reads the binary unsigned-short stream in samples.u and writes normalized single-precision floats (scaled by 1/65536) to samples.f, producing values in the 0.0 to 1.0 range suitable for further floating-point signal processing.

Example 2. Scale and analyze a sample stream

u-f 0.5 < signal.u | dstats

Halves every unsigned-short sample, converts it to floating point, and pipes the result to dstats(1) to report the minimum, maximum, mean, and other descriptive statistics of the scaled data.