FSSD Converter

FSSD is a raw audio format that originated in the classic Macintosh ecosystem, where Farallon Computing's MacRecorder hardware (1988) stored digitized sound as unsigned 8-bit PCM in resource fork entries tagged with the 'FSSD' type code. In modern audio processing tools such as SoX, FSSD is treated as an alias for the u8 (unsigned 8-bit) raw format — headerless files containing a flat stream of single-byte amplitude samples, where each value from 0 to 255 represents an audio level with 128 as the center point. Because there is no header, playback parameters like sample rate and channel count must be provided externally. The original MacRecorder typically captured at rates up to 22 kHz in mono, though any sample rate is valid when interpreting the raw data. FSSD and its compressed companion format HCOM (which adds Huffman compression to the same underlying data) were the standard audio formats for early Mac multimedia: HyperCard stacks, educational CD-ROMs, and system alert sounds of the late 1980s and early 1990s relied heavily on this encoding. One advantage of the raw FSSD format is trivial parseability — with no container overhead, the audio data begins at byte zero and can be read by any tool capable of processing unsigned 8-bit PCM. The format's historical significance also makes it practically relevant for digital archivists: converting FSSD recordings to modern containers like WAV preserves the original audio content losslessly, since the raw samples only need a header prepended, not any form of transcoding.