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aifc.py fails to open AIFF files containing the compression type "sowt" in the COMM chunk with an "unsupported compression type" error.
This compression type is an Apple specific extension that signals that the data is not actually compressed but is stored uncompressed in little Endian order. 
Supporting it would require a trivial change to allow the compression type as a byte-string and to add a do-nothing _convert routine. 
This would allow aifc.py to be used with AIFF files on Apple macOS.

Anyway, such a function addition could only get into 3.7.

Seems the "sowt" compression is not just a no-op operation. Perhaps it should change a byte order.
Needed tests and test files for the new compression.

I think it's probably better as a no-op. Currently in my patch I just put 
 return data
You could do
 return data[::-1]
to reverse the sample, so that it came out as big endian, but if you leave it as a no-op then the data is returned in the native format for Intel Mac OS, which is the whole point of the "sowt" encoding. Either way, the user can easily reverse the data in a `unpack` format if they want to, but in my own testing it seemed easier and simpler just to leave it in the native format. Then basically "it just works".
The patch as I've proposed it works fine on my MacOS boxes, but I have only tested it with AIFF-C files from one source.

If you read a normal uncompressed AIFF with aifc, the samples are in big-endian order and need to be converted before they can be played on little-endian systems.
As all other compression schemes produce big-endian data, so should 'SOWT' encoded AIFF. Therefore, the bytes of each sample should be swapped on read and write.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Interchange_File_Format#AIFF_on_Mac_OS_X 

New changeset e4ed9d21534c2ed4397fdee0bb530a6e6a2c5af8 by dnknth in branch 'main':
bpo-30077: Add support for Apple aifc/sowt pseudo-compression (GH-24449)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/e4ed9d21534c2ed4397fdee0bb530a6e6a2c5af8

Thanks for reporting and the initial patch, Toby. And thanks for pushing this across the finish line, Yussuf! ✨ 🍰 ✨

Hey! thanks for letting me know, glad it got there in the end. T.
On 2021年8月13日, at 12:33, Łukasz Langa wrote:
> 
> Łukasz Langa <lukasz@langa.pl> added the comment:
> 
> Thanks for reporting and the initial patch, Toby. And thanks for 
> pushing this across the finish line, Yussuf! ✨ 🍰 ✨
> 
> ----------
> resolution: -> fixed
> stage: patch review -> resolved
> status: open -> closed
> versions: +Python 3.11 -Python 3.8
> 
> _______________________________________
> Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <https://bugs.python.org/issue30077>
> _______________________________________
>