API FOR BIOPAC FILE FORMATS - ACKAPI

The AcqKnowledge File Format Application Programming Interface (API) is a software library that people with programming knowledge can use to identify and parse information in BIOPAC's ACQ binary file format.

• The API is a software library for programmers to use when creating applications—it is not a data extraction program.

The API is the easiest way for people with programming knowledge to extract data from ACQ files for advanced analysis. Use the base functions in a variety of combinations to extract specific data from an ACQ file to use in a new application. The AcqKnowledge API allows you to:

• Initialize an ACQ file structure
• Close an ACQ file structure
• Retrieve channel information
• Retrieve samples by segment of a specified channel
• Retrieve all the samples of a specified channel
• Retrieve a particular sample of a specified channel
• Retrieve samples by time slice of a specified channel
• Retrieve Journal Text from AcqKnowledge 3.7.3 or below
• Retrieve marker information
• Retrieve marker text of a specified marker

Use these base functions in a variety of combinations to extract specific data from an ACQ file and then use or transform the data in other analysis programs.

The File Format API (ACKAPI version 3.2.0.2) can be used to retrieve data from single sample rate files containing stored channels of the same length and saved with the following BIOPAC software products:

• Windows 
  • single sample rate, non-compressed, not GLP:
    • AcqKnowledge 4.1 - 4.3.0 and 3.7.0 - 3.9.1
    • Biopac Student Lab 4.0.0 and 3.7.0 - 3.7.2
• Macintosh.
• single sample rate, non-compressed, not GLP:
• AcqKnowledge 4.1 - 4.3.0
• Biopac Student Lab 4.0.0
• single sample rate, non-compressed, not GLP, saved as "Graph (Windows)":
• AcqKnowledge 3.7 - 3.9
• Biopac Student Lab 3.7.1 - 3.7.2

The API requires a Windows OS. The implementation of these functions is compiled into a Windows 32-bit DLL called "acqfile.dll." Although the interface is documented here in C/C++, any programming language that is able to utilize Windows 32-bit DLLs should be able to access the BIOPAC File Format API. The API was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio C/C++ and is designed to be compatible with Microsoft C++ and Microsoft Visual Basic. The API may work with other developer's tools, but has not been tested for compatibility.