Topic: Sound Devices 7xx - Badger 2.24 Beta/Wave Agent - 07/09/2007

[baustin]

Wave Agent - v 1.0.10 (Windows only) - http://www.sounddevices.com/products/waveagent.htm

I guess this acts as FLAC > WAV converter. We should try this next to FLAC Frontend to see if the conversions are identical.

7-Series Beta Firmware - Badger v 2.24 - http://www.sounddevices.com/download/7-beta.htm

Revision 2.24 firmware is unreleased, unsupported, non-production code. We expect that there are bugs in this code. It is released expressly in order to preview future functionality and to find bugs and errors through user's experience. Use at your own risk. We strongly recommend against using for any type of critical production or recording. Unreleased firmware should only be tested by users with a thorough understanding of the operation of the 7-Series Recorders. Revert to the present release revision, 2.15, for critical use and support.

[mmedley.]

Beat me to it. 

Edit to add...

This Wave Agent software looks pretty cool.

[baustin]

Beat me to it. 

Oh yeah I did! See what happens when you can't sleep at 3am on a Monday night. Could've been you! 

[OFOTD]

I compared WaveAgent and FLAC 1.14 decompression times.  1.14 blew it out of the water.  Not much of a surprise but its a cool little program.   Should be very handy for anyone that runs 4x1 channels as it will decompress the 4 channels into separate tracks.

Also the SD info states that it decompress FLAC into BWF.  Mine decompressed directly to wav and not bwf for a standard FLAC file.   I'll try compressing a bwf file and then decompressing to see the results.


+T for the link last night baustin.

[mmedley.]

I am 99% sure that BWF and WAV are the exact same...one is just Microsoft's branding.

Edit:

BWF just has some other metadata in the headers it appears.

[mwz]

+T 

Limited to inputs 1 & 2 and tracks A & B
max sample rate 96

good start!

[OFOTD]

I am 99% sure that BWF and WAV are the exact same...one is just Microsoft's branding.

Ahh my two channel friend.  Actually bwf is a derivative of wav but not quite the same.    Its biggest difference is its ability to hold quite a bit of metadata.  That could be anything from the timecode to recorder info to a whole host of other things.  It also is oblivious to the 2GB file limit problem of regular wave files.

From Wikipedia:

WAV compatibility

Since the only difference between a BWF and a "normal" WAV is the extended information in the file header (Bext-Chunk, Coding-History, etc...), a BWF does not require a special player for playback.

Unfortunately, this compatibility also preserves the 4 GB filesize limitation that WAV files have. In order to be able to store audio which would exceed this limit, a naming convention exists for tagging subsequent files: .wav, .w01, .w02, ..., .wNN

Each of those segments is a regular Wave/BWF file, but players aware of this convention will treat all segments as one single, long piece of audio when opening the first segment ".wav".

As an extension, RF64 is a BWF-compatible multichannel file format enabling file sizes to exceed 4 GB that has been specified in 2006.