TrID is a freeware file identifier. You point it to a file and it try to guess the file's type.
The analysis is done irregardless of file's name & extension. Instead, TrID look at the file contents, and compare it to a set of knowed patterns.

Aside from identifing a lot of archives, bitmaps, executables and so on, what is of intrest of the Hydrogenaudio community is that it can recognize a number of compressed audio formats, songs/modules, or distinguish a foobar2k plugin from a WinAmp one, skins, etc.
This can be handy in case of misnamed file, truncated extension, file recovered with some data rescue tools, etc.

Actually the database count over 930 filetypes (near 100 audio related). Have a look at the list here: file type defs
New or improved definitions can easyly be created using the companion tool TrIDScan. If you have a file that is not correctly recognized, you can quickly "refine" the definition. Then, if you send me the new defs, I will include it in the public DB asap.
You are strongly encouraged, if you can, to generate new & better defs for the kind of files you are more familiar with!

The base TrID package containts the plain Win32 command line versions of both TrID & TrIDScan, along with the latest defs database.
There is also a .NET GUI available, TrIDNet.

Bye!

The new v2.00 of TrID file identifier is out!



Most interesting new features is the ability to scan entire folders and, eventually, adjusting the file extensions adding the guessed ones! This come handy for example when operating on a bunch of files recovered with some data rescue software and it's impossible to recover the original filenames & extensions.

Here's the quick help summary:



Hope this may help someones,
Bye!

Still no *nix version. It would be a good replacement for file, I think.

Here it is, finally!



Link: TrID file identifier

Tested on a Slackware with kernel 2.6.16 and Ubuntu 5.10.
Feedback on other distros is greatly appreciated.

Bye!