Converting Audio From Unknown Format

Question

I would like to create a utility in either PHP or Perl to convert an audio file created by the Nortel's Callpilot voice mail system into a wave file. The problem is that the format, which has the .vbk file extension, is unknown to virtually any audio player. To date, I have not found one that will play a .vbk file. I've looked at audio file conversion libraries in CPAN and tried many of them, they don't recognize the file. I was not successful with PHP's audio formats manipulation either. Nortel does provide a converter, however, it does not suite my needs. I would like to have this run via cron on a CentOS system. I don't know how to reverse engineer this format. There seems to be just scraps of info on this format on the web. This page indicates that it is "based on the H.232 format": https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/job/Reverse-Engineer-Nortel-VBK-Audio-Format_~~f501f11679f3f6bb/

Answer 1

Well, this is the joy of closed proprietary systems. But there is a chance they could play nice. Try to contact Callpilot and see if they'll give you the format specs. It's worth a shot.

As for reverse engineering, you need to be able to generate known content. Like a constant tone at 60Hz for exactly 1 second. Then at 50Hz. Then at 10 seconds. Compare them. Isolate the data from the metadata. There is going to becompression involved, so try a handful of common compression schemes, maybe research into Nortel's practices will probably tell you more. If you can feed that into a player and get a tone back out, you're on your way.

There's probably more informed and structured ways to go about reverse engineering, but from my experience it's a lot of trial and error.

Answer 2

I know this is a very old thread, but I've recently been looking into converting Nortel's vbk format as well. Importing the vbk files into Audacity with raw data option, Encoding: U-Law, Byte order: little-endian, Channels: 1 Channel (Mono), Sample rate: 8000 Hz. Not sure if they have multiple formats for their vbk files, but mine were from a BCM50 phone system.