Importing Wave files

[Shooshie]

Yes, DP6; please hurry!

Shoosh

[Frodo]

Sugardilly, that 1GB is borderline.

Ah, so the Monkster picked up on RamFro's hunch!

Yeah, 1GB. That leaves maybe 500MB left over with OSX running.

[sugardilly]

Thanks guys.

Everything has been working fine so far but I'll look into increasing the memory.

Also all of the files that I bring from the Pro Tools studio do not have that same problem. That is the interesting thing.

Some work fine and others are slow to load and slow to save.

HMMMMM

[monkey man]

and others are slow to load and slow to save.

Could it be that DP is employing the HD unnecessarily because of a lack of RAM?

Glad the Fwoggy bait hooked you RAMFro; it's always good to see consistency.

[EMRR]

Here's one new to me. Got .wav files from a client. They import and play fine in Soundhack, Quicktime, and Itunes. I pull them into DP4.61 any number of ways, and I get 4KB sdII files of 0:00 length. Which then promptly crash DP. One possible clue I see in the client's song folders is .wav.npk files bearing same names as the .wav files. I haven't found much about them yet, and haven't heard back from the client yet. I've pulled in .wav from this client before with no problems. I can re-open the DP session and drag any other .wav from him, or any other file I can find with no problem. Try the latest .wav again, and same problem.

Any ideas?

[rcannonp]

Right.
So what could be going on there after the files are converted?
It's not like there's any background processing after the fact. The files are converted to sd2 and then it's done. I think.....

Would automatically analyzing beats and tempos(on a G4 with 1GB RAM) in the files slow things down after an import?

[EMRR]

Here's one new to me. Got .wav files from a client. They import and play fine in Soundhack, Quicktime, and Itunes. I pull them into DP4.61 any number of ways, and I get 4KB sdII files of 0:00 length. Which then promptly crash DP. One possible clue I see in the client's song folders is .wav.npk files bearing same names as the .wav files. I haven't found much about them yet, and haven't heard back from the client yet. I've pulled in .wav from this client before with no problems. I can re-open the DP session and drag any other .wav from him, or any other file I can find with no problem. Try the latest .wav again, and same problem.

Any ideas?

The other possible clue is that, in drag and drop mode, you normally see a transparent outline of the file you are about to drop while still holding it. These files appear as little vertical bars, which would seem to indicate that DP interprets them as 0:00 length files before they've even been imported and converted.

Again, any ideas?

[pcm]

Right.
So what could be going on there after the files are converted?
It's not like there's any background processing after the fact. The files are converted to sd2 and then it's done. I think.....

Would automatically analyzing beats and tempos(on a G4 with 1GB RAM) in the files slow things down after an import?

Would it ever. I have that stuff turned off. If I need to analyze beats and tempos, for the purpose of doing beat-editing type work, I go elsewhere.

That said, I regularly drag wav files from the Finder right into the timeline in DP, with no problem. But I have analysis stuff turned off, and I always work at the same sample rate and bit depth. So all it is is a straight up copy with a header change. I also drag SD2 files back into Pro Tools the same way. I only use wave format in Pro Tools, so when I move files back and forth, there is always this sd2 - wave file change going on. But it always works, with no problems.

[EMRR]

Here's one new to me. Got .wav files from a client. They import and play fine in Soundhack, Quicktime, and Itunes. I pull them into DP4.61 any number of ways, and I get 4KB sdII files of 0:00 length. Which then promptly crash DP. One possible clue I see in the client's song folders is .wav.npk files bearing same names as the .wav files. I haven't found much about them yet, and haven't heard back from the client yet. I've pulled in .wav from this client before with no problems. I can re-open the DP session and drag any other .wav from him, or any other file I can find with no problem. Try the latest .wav again, and same problem.

Any ideas?

The other possible clue is that, in drag and drop mode, you normally see a transparent outline of the file you are about to drop while still holding it. These files appear as little vertical bars, which would seem to indicate that DP interprets them as 0:00 length files before they've even been imported and converted.

Again, any ideas?

Maybe a byte order issue? I've also looked at them in DP 5.13 on an Intel Mac; same deal. The Soundhack tool for re-writing data headers displays the encoding as '24 bit Byte Swap'. A previous file from the same client shows up as '24 bit linear'. On the surface, both types are listed as 24 bit linear files, which contradicts the encoding data. File size and duration info is correct in the programs that do successfully play.

If my interpretation of the problem is correct, does anyone know of a simple tool that will address it, or am I best off demanding a new export from the client?

Off to search 'byte order'......

[leigh]

I received a 3.9 GB 96/24 stereo wave file of a concert recorded using some flavor of PT. DP couldn't import it because the file size was written using (I think) a signed integer for the file size instead of unsigned which gave an incorrect file length.

QuickTime Pro was quite forgiving and would open and play it. I ended up using QT Pro to split it at some applause into 2 files smaller than 2 GB and then DP 5.13 would import them correctly.

It's not clear to me if the problem is with DP, OS X, or PT.

Hope this helps you out.

[tomeaton]

This is why I own PT, Nuendo and DP. Nuendo can pretty much instantly convert anything to anything, and can open almost anything. PT is useful for those that send me files from the dark side, or when I have files headed for the dark side.

I recently had to assemble a project that came in as WAV files from RADAR, PT overdubs against a rough mix, and some DP overdubs. DP couldn't open the WAV files, no one had consolidated the PT sessions, and I had all three programs open and chugging to assemble some semblance of music in DP.

There is a relatively inexpensive program called Sample Manager:

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/samplemanager/

Which can do pretty much any conversion, and also has the iZotope SRC algorithm (which sounds amazing). Sample Manager has gotten me out of a few conversion binds (though it is NOT speedy), and is the last step in my mastering chain at all times (doing SRC).

[EMRR]

Thanks; I've heard tales from my mastering house of them receiving occasional sessions with incorrect byte order, and getting 0 dbFS white noise (!) rather than audio.

I would think it's a DP problem, since I replicate the scenario with wholly different DP4/PPCG5/10.4.3 and DP5/IntelPM/10.5.2 systems. But I really don't know enough to speculate as much as that.

[EMRR]

tomeaton, missed your reply the first time. I'll look at that. Unfortunately I'm looking at 15 three minute songs in full multitrack, so this may be on the client to re-export in a more suitable format. I need to look at Soundhack again; I didn't see an option for addressing byte order issues there, but maybe I missed it. I'll keep digging, thanks.....

[tomeaton]

Ugh... it's a pain. Nuendo is a racehorse at this stuff...

DP6 with wav support will be a blessing.

t

[EMRR]

Painful and immediate answer seems to be Soundhack 'save as' to convert to something else that's playable by DP. It is indeed a byte order issue. 4 clicks, multiply by 248 times.