Topic: ADAT Playback

[flecom]

Ok I searched and searched but could not quite find what the answer I am looking for, I have a ton of shows on ADAT, all of which are now stored on an Alesis HD24...

I use the following utility

http://www.40watt.co.uk/hd24/readme.html

to extract the WAV data from the hard disk and dump it onto my PC (the FTP is horrifically slow)

so this gives me 8 individual mono 24bit 48khz WAV files

1 X
2 Y
3 Red
4 Green
5 Blue
6 Timecode
7 Left Audio
8 Right Audio

is there any way that I can throw these 8 wav files into laserboy (or some other app) and playback the show like if it was being played off an ADAT machine? If it makes a difference I don't care about the timecode data when being played back from the computer, that only matters when its actually being played off the ADAT machine anyway

[James]

Yes!

First convert each one to 16-bit @ 48K samples per second.

Then open them into Audacity and save the whole mess as one 8 channel wave.

Done!

I have a ton of shows on ADAT

Hmmmmmmm. I can help! I have both an ADAT machine and an Echo Layla 24/96. I've already done a lot of direct-digital, real-time tape transcriptions via LightPipe and it works great!

If the timecode is plain old smtpe, there is no reason to give it up.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net

http://akrobiz.com/laserboy/forum/index.php/topic,8.0.html

BTW, none of this has anything to do with the LaserBoy application, however LaserBoy can open these waves and, in some cases, do a pretty good job of reframing the data to be saved as ILDA or whatever.

James. 

[flecom]

well the Alesis HD24 already saves the show on an IDE hard drive, so all I have to do is take the hard drive out of the caddy, put it in my PC and use that software to dump the entire show to the hard disk, only takes a few seconds

timecode is SMTPE but I dont really have a use for it when not playing back off the ADAT machine... basically I am looking at making a tiny RGV projector and my netbook to be able to playback shows without lugging my pangolin machine around... I already use that with LC-ADAT when I need to edit the ADAT shows, but I want a portable setup, I instantly remembered the offset board, figuring if anything I could probably just play back all the tracks in audacity or something since I already have them as audio anyway...

[James]

You can put them together into a single wave in Audacity and play them with the free version of Spider-Player simply by double clicking the wave's icon. Spider-Player has a time slider that allows you to cue and drop anywhere in the wave.

http://spider-player.com/

James. 

[flecom]

I think foobar also has this functionality, I know I playback FLAC files that are in 5.1 in it without issue (although I mixdown to stereo, but thats another story lol)

hrmm, could convert my lasershow WAV's to FLAC, wouldn't that be something?!

[meandean]

  What! More wav files?

[James]

No. Just a different way to peel the same grape.

James. 

[flecom]

I wonder if FLAC could deal with DC... would be nice to have some lossless data compression 

[meandean]

 What is FLAC???

[James]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

Alec and I taked about this for a while on the phone. This project doesn't support waves of more than two channels.

But, it might make some sence to come up with a custom RLE compression scheme that splits the wave into its mono streams and RLE compresses each track. This would be a totally new kind of file and would need to be converted back to a multi channel wave before it could be used for anything. I guess this is just one more thing to throw on the pile of possible things to do!

James. 

[BlinkenLights]

done yet?

[flecom]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

Alec and I taked about this for a while on the phone. This project doesn't support waves of more than two channels.

But, it might make some sence to come up with a custom RLE compression scheme that splits the wave into its mono streams and RLE compresses each track. This would be a totally new kind of file and would need to be converted back to a multi channel wave before it could be used for anything. I guess this is just one more thing to throw on the pile of possible things to do!

James. 

FLAC supports 8 channels

http://flac.sourceforge.net/faq.html#general__channels

[James]

I don't believe it supports 8 channels in a single WAVE file.

James. 

[meandean]

 Win Media Player has a lossless WMA fmt for ripping audio CD, from the few tests I've done, it
cuts the data size in half, zip is not quite that good, but it can reduce the size about 20-30%,
and it does vary widely- select test signals can collapse over 99%.

 I curious what FLAC can do with laser material, and I looked through the article, but I do not agree
with their claim that wav fmt is complicated- nothing could be further from the truth (it's why wav
takes so much space, it is straight one-for-one storage that can be blasted directly into a DAC). Yes,
wav can include user defined non-audio information, but that's a good thing!

 It wasn't long ago that a PC couldn't handle audio CD data rates, but it's so different now when you
can get a USB 8Gb stick for under $20, and computers come with several GB of memory. Wav is so easy to
work with (even I can do it), that I don't think that it's worth the trouble to even bother with anything
else now that there is so much over-capacity available!

[James]

I do not agree with their claim that wav fmt is complicated

Alec was reading that stuff while I was on the phone, laughing....

If I had given any thought to the fact that almost every aspect of LaserBoy is impossible, I'd probably still be sitting in my basement goofing around with...............................  never mind.

Waves are still pretty big to be transferring over the Internet.

James.