i will read your reply carefully and see if there is anything that might help me with my problem.
to answer your question about the use of a WAV file: i am actually logging motion information with a microcontroller into a simple text file format. the reason for converting it to a WAV file is because i want to be able to edit the files in a variety of ways. instead of writing a graphical editor, i thought it made sense to use something that exists and has all the editing capability that i need. Audacity and other audio editing programs do exactly what i want, copying and pasting, changes of amplitude, editing individual samples, etc. i had no problem converting my text file to WAV using Perl but converting it back seems to be the problem. this is what i need the sample values for.