Topic: Sound Devices Technical Bulletin - 7-Series File Incompatibility Issue

[baustin]

Sound Devices would like to make our 7-Series owners, users, and
resellers aware of a know issue relating to WAV files generated by
7-Series recorders.

ISSUE
***************
Wave files (Broadcast Wave) recorded by a 7-Series recorder with the
attributes below may not properly import into the latest release of
Avid or Pro Tools. These files may appear to the application as
unreadable. File attributes must include the following for the
condition to occur:

 - 24-bit depth,
 - 1-track (monophonic) or 3-track polyphonic

From our experience, files with the above attributes fail to import
roughly 50% of the time.

SOLUTION
***************
Until a new release of 7-Series firmware is available correcting this
bug we recommend selecting either two-track or four-track 24-bit files
when recording material that will be posted in Avid or Pro Tools.
Two-track and four-track files do not have any issues importing into
these applications, nor do any files recorded at 16-bits.

This behavior exists with all Sound Devices firmware releases up to
and including the present version, 2.10.

BACKGROUND
***************
Wave files use a RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format) structure to
represent their file metadata. One requirement of RIFF file chunks is
that they must be word aligned. This means that their total size must
be a multiple of 2 bytes (ie. 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on). Most audio
software applications do not rely on even byte RIFF chunks to parse
metadata properly. The latest releases of Avid Technologies Inc.
software, namely the Digidesign ProTools and Avid family of products,
do require WAV files to meet this part of the RIFF standard and can
have difficulty properly importing files which do not meet this
requirement. Sound Devices Wave files generated with odd track counts
at 24-bits have the possibility of producing an odd byte RIFF header.
Problems do NOT occur with 2- or 4-track poly files, or ANY file that
records at 16-bit, since the number of bytes for these types of files
will always come out even.

If you have additional questions concerning this condition please
contact our support staff at support@sounddevices.com.

Support Staff
Sound Devices, LLC