PLEASE HELP - Strange problem converting from bytes to float

From:
"cpptutor2000@yahoo.com" <cpptutor2000@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:34:44 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<3ef46e35-4dde-4fff-8d45-cfa10c86c58f@e67g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>
Could some Java guru please help me ? I am trying to create a simple
application that will capture audio from the PC's default listening
device and do some FFT with the data. The audio bytes are collected in
a byte array, and the main problem I am having right now is how to
convert them to the floating point numbers that would be used in the
computation of the FFT. For prototyping purposes, I am using a
floating point array as :

private final int len = 4096;

float [][] floatArray = new float[len][2];

The reason I am using using the 2-D array is that one dimension would
hold the real and the other the imaginary component of the complex
numbers to be used for the FFT. To convert consecutive chunks of 4
bytes to get a floating point number, I am using the following
function:

public static float arr2float (byte[] arr, int start)
  {
        int i = 0;
        int len = 4;
        int cnt = 0;
        byte[] tmp = new byte[len];
        for (i = start; i < (start + len); i++)
                {
            tmp[cnt] = arr[i];
            cnt++;
        }
        int accum = 0;
        i = 0;
        for ( int shiftBy = 0; shiftBy < 32;
                       shiftBy += 8 )
                 {
            accum |= ( (long)( tmp[i] & 0xff )
                                         ) << shiftBy;
            i++;
        }
        return Float.intBitsToFloat(accum);
 }

The actual conversion from the raw bytes to the flaoting point numbers
is done via a loop as:

for (int start = 0; start < 4096; start += 4)
    {
         floatArray[cnt][0] =
        RecordUtility.arr2float(recordedSoundArray,
                                         start);
         floatArray[cnt][1] = 0;
         System.out.println(cnt + " "
                                          +floatArray[cnt][0]);
         cnt++;
    }

Unfortunately, the output of the print statement looks like:
0 12690.33
1 1.64703E-40
2 3428.0837
3 2.0703801E-19
4 2.24E-44
5 9.1837E-41
6 1.121E-41
7 2.2421E-41
8 1.469371E-39
9 2.8175146E20
10 1.64653E-40

This is what bothers me that the numbers are huge or very small, and
there are quite a few 'NaN's.

Could someone please kindly provide some hints as what I might be
doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for your help.

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