Here are the cases I've encountered where the eltype of the returns samples is not T:

• samples are already decoded (no-op)
• samples are encoded but resolution/offset is 1/0 (also no-op)

To be fair, this is consistent with the documentation but you have to read a few layers deep to grasp it. I think at least this needs to be called out in the docstring for decode(::Samples, ::Type{T}), and we may possibly want to change the behavior to make this actually useful in cases where the eltype really does need to be T.

The current workaround is to use something like

samples = Onda.load(signal; encoded=true)
samples = decode!(similar(samples.data, T), samples)

since decode! actually does a copyto/broadcast!. However, in the broadcast! case, the scale/offset are not converted to T so you will end up converting to Float64 before going to whatever T is on copy, and there's no way around that. You could decode first and then decode! but that seems pretty roundabout and requires you to read all the various methods' docstrings to figure out whether adn why that would work.