Topic: Tracking 24bit Audio

[ford prefect]

Larry Narachi gave me a bunch of his 24/48 recordings this past summer without splits between tracks - just single file for each set. He just gave me permission to split them up and upload to a couple places, so I'm about to do that. However, I was going to use CD Wave (I have 1.92 here) until I saw this info (thanks to Dave Klein's post in a thread below):

http://www.homepages.hetnet.nl/~mjmlooijmans/cdwave/faq.html#24bit

Now I'm not sure if I want to do that since some programs haven't adopted the ability to read this new standard that CD Wave automatically uses.

Thoughts on the best means to track 24bit material? Some folks (Jamie Lutch) use CD Wave. Others (Dail Reed, Charlie Miller) use WaveLab or Samplitude.

-Brad

[dmonterisi]

i have used wavelab without any issues.  just drop markers and use the autosplit function to split at the markers.  at 24bit, there are no sector boundary issues to worry about with using wavelab.

[dklein]

Hey - that info I posted might be out of date.  I looked in the list of software updates and it looks like Mike added this function in v1.91

I just tried a 24 bit file and it was readable by cool edit pro.  When you go to save the file, CDWave shows a checkbox for use alternate 24 bit format.  fwiw, I tried it both ways and CEP opened both of them.

[ford prefect]

Thanks guys, I think I'm gonna try wavelab first and see how that works.

[Wes]

Wavelab does work well, the only flaw I can think of is if you want to save each track as a seperate audio file, it only supports a 44.1K sample rate.  The only way I could figure out how to get around it was select each track after tracking out the whole thing and use the "save as" command to save it to its own file name.

[Simp-Dawg]

i use cd wave and haven't noticed any problems, however i just flac 'em and archive as i don't have a true 24bit listening system or ability to burn dvd-a

[ford prefect]

Just a follow up guys, per this comment by dklein:

I just tried a 24 bit file and it was readable by cool edit pro.  When you go to save the file, CDWave shows a checkbox for use alternate 24 bit format.  fwiw, I tried it both ways and CEP opened both of them.

I tried both ways too after playing with WaveLab. However, if you don't check that box, FLAC won't be able to encode the resulting files. This is what I got for an error message:

options: -P 4096 -b 4608 -m -l 12 -e -q 0 -r 0,6
sci2003-07-24-mk4v-set2t08.wav: WARNING: found non-standard 'fmt ' sub-chunk whi ch has length = 40
sci2003-07-24-mk4v-set2t08.wav: ERROR: unsupported compression type 65534

When I *did* check the box to use an alternate format, FLAC had no problems with it. Interesting.

Hopefully CD Wave builds in some support for adding ID tags to FLAC files kinda like Frontend's "Tag Conf". If it had that support, I'd use it every time.

-Brad