Is there no way to bypass the Windows requirement for working with Thermo RAW files

Question

[uki]

I am working on a mac, and need to work with some raw files. Essentially I am working on a tool that works with MGF and MZML files. I am extremely frustrated by the fact the only way to carry out this conversion seems to be either doing it on a different computer running windows or installing windows within bootcamp/virtual machine.

Seriously in the age of information and data, are still being slowed down with vendor supplied libraries being old and incompatible? It reminds me graphics card drivers for Linux 10-15 years ago. So frustrating..

Answer 1

[mobiusklein]

Thermo has released a new version of their RAW file reader written for .NET http://planetorbitrap.com/rawfilereader#.W9R8oZNKiUk. This is only a library, so you'll need to use a tool written on top of it like https://github.com/compomics/ThermoRawFileParser in order to convert a RAW file to an open format, but they should run on Mac and *nix systems which .NET has been ported to.

Answer 2

[alex]

Thermo provides only Windows DLLs to read the RAW format. That is why all software, that is able to read Thermo RAW (via the Thermo API) is running on Windows.

Did you have a look at OpenChrom? It reads tons of vendor formats natively, mostly by reverse-engineered binary readers. I am not sure if Thermo RAW is supported as well, though.

MGF is a text-based format, for that there should be plenty of readers out there, for example this.

[uki]

I was working with msconvert which is part of the Proteowizard toolkit.

I have no issues working with MGF just the conversion from RAW -> anything else, without using a windows machine in between

Answer 3

[harish]

Not really a solution but don't these Tools work on Wine or Crossover? I do remember a buddy doing this long back, so I might be wrong.