Like the title says, this seems to be a problem. Basically I'm writing a small application for comparing audio with different bit quantizations; I realize there is little actual "need" to go beyond 16 bits because it should be perceived as near perfect with regards to dynamic range anyway, but the point of my application is to present its user with a first hand experience demonstrating this amongst other things (yes it is part of a paper I'm writing at my university).
Anyway, it appears that audio formats with any variation of 24- or 32-bits are considered not supported by the JAPI on Windows 7 (and, I presume from reading other posts about this, on other Windows versions as well). My main reason for choosing Java for this project was its potential for platform independent deployment. I could understand if this was a problem with Windows or the target computer's installed hardware itself, but it isn't - my sound card is well capable of working with these bit depths; to further move away from the "it's a Windows problem" approach, a small test project written in C# did at least not have any problems playing back signed / unsigned 24-bit integer audio streams, though 32-bits wouldn't work.
Thus it would seem that the problem may be the actual implementation of the Java Sound API on Windows; is there any alternative sound API that may be used (and that preferably is cross-platform as well) should this be the case? Or may it be that I'm missing something else?
Thankful for any replies, Husbjörn