The MiniSEED format (https://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/data/formats/miniseed/) is described by the SEED standard (SEED, 2012) which is used for time series data. Time series are stored as essentially independent fixed-length data records, each containing a small segment of continuous series values. Due to data compression, the number of samples in a record may vary. Typical record lengths are 512 bytes (for real-time streams) and 4096 bytes (for archiving), other record lengths are used in special cases.
MiniSEED contains very limited metadata for time series, other than time series identification and simple status flags. In particular, geographic coordinates, instrument response information, scaling, and other information needed to interpret data values are not included. Therefore, missing information is required. If it has not been previously loaded into the program, then together with the MiniSEED file the module tries to load the dataless SEED file containing the necessary information. This file should be defined for each station, the name should be in the form of NN.SSSS.dataless, where NN is the network code, SSSS is the station code, and this file should be in the ./Config subdirectory.
If there is no configuration file and MiniSEED data is float or double, it is assumed as velocity data in m/s.
There is more than one programming library that supports reading and writing MiniSEED data easily without knowing the details of the format. The module is based on the libmseed library.