Lego Mindstorms RSO Format

I recently read a magazine article about Lego Mindstorms. Naturally, the item that caught my eye was the mention of a bit of Lego software that converts various audio file formats to a custom format called RSO that can be downloaded into a Mindstorms project to make the creation output audio. To read different sources, one might be left with the impression that there is something super-duper top secret proprietary about the format. Such impressions do not hold up under casual analysis of a sample file.

A Google search for “filetype:rso” yielded a few pre-made samples that I have mirrored into the samples archive. The format appears to be an 8-byte header followed by unsigned, 8-bit PCM. More on the wiki. If FFmpeg could gain an RSO file muxer, that would presumably be a heroic feat to the Lego hacking community.

3 thoughts on “Lego Mindstorms RSO Format

  1. Multimedia Mike Post author

    @funman: Thanks for the data; I have updated the Wiki. Though “IMA ADPCM” is a bit ambiguous (what are the initializer values? What order are the nibbles stored in?)

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