reference end of soundfile, instead of its numeric length inside a bpf?

[p8rpp]

Howdy list,

When writing breakpoint files, is there a placeholder for "total
duration of file" so that I don't have to manually check for, and insert
into the file, the total duration? Something like
     0       val1
     5       val2
     end     val3

Thanks for all suggestions!
Peter

[rwdobson]

Breakpoint files are not in any way functionally or semantically connected to a soundfile (it would be very common for the same file to be used with many different soundfiles). If the soundfile happens to be longer than the final duration of a breakpoint file, the final value is sustained. All CDP programs parse the breakpoint file to ensure time values are always increasing. I suppose, given a basic utility to report a duration,  a shell script, perl program etc could be used to detect a placeholder string such as "VAL" and replace it with a value extracted from the console output of "sfprops" or "sndinfo len", or from whatever new utility was written to do the job.

[lynx]

Both Sound Loom and Soundshaper have features that automatically insert the duration of the "input" sound file into the breakpoint file you are editing, with SS having additional features for scaling breakpoint files for input files longer or shorter in duration than the file the breakpoint file was written for.  But the actual process only understands literal time values.  To my knowledge, no such "shortcut" exists.