I just wanted to mention that I had trouble with the wavread that comes in Octave-forge because all my wave files are 32bit float. However, after searching the internet, I found
http://velveeta.che.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/octave/scripts/audio/wavread.m?rev=1.3 , a version that handles the 32bit floats fine. Is this version in a different repository I am not aware of, or should it be in Octave-forge?