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Old 1st June 2005, 15:35   #5  |  Link
johnman
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Since im bored im using this old post to describe some of the options of wavewizard (=ww).

Well lets start with the channel mapping feature. ww makes it possible to go from a x channel wav to a y channel wav by "simply" creating a matrix. This can be done on 2 different but very similair ways:
moving and mixing.

Channel moving will just move the channels from one "location" to an other "location".
To illustrate this here is an example (NB the first channel is numbered as 0).
Lets say you have a normal stereo file which you want to convert to a 4 channel wav. The 2 channel wav is an interleaved stream like this:

L1R1 L2R2 L3R3 L4R4 L5R5
This means the wav has first a sample for the left channel (ch0) and then a sample for the right channel (ch1) and then the second sample for the left channel etc....


If you now make a 2 to 4 channel mapping like this:



And fill it in like this:


It wil convert a 2 channel file to 4 channels by placing channel 0 at channel 0 and 2 of the new file, and channel 1 goes to channel 1 and 3 of the new file. So what you get is this:

L1R1L1R1 L2R2L2R2 L3R3L3R3

If you enable this mapping, and insert 2 channel files, all 2 channel files will be converted to 4 channel files. All other files with a different number of channels are unaffected (unless you enable also other mappings)

Now lets say you dont to just move the channels, but you want to add a third channel by mixing left and right. Well for this you would need to use an other type of mapping: mix

Make a new 2->3 channel mapping like this:


and configure it like this:


Channel 0 and 1 remain the same, but channel 2 is created by taking the sum of 0.5* ch0 and 0.5*ch1. So this will create a 3 channel file with the third channel a mix from the original left and right channel.


When you leave a channel empty when configuring a mapping, it will be filled with silence. You can also use negative values when configuring a mix mapping.

Whenever you have enabled a channel mapping from i.e. 2->3 channels, all 2 channel files in the list are considered as 3 channel files. So If you want to use cb to convert it to an other format, you must make sure that format supports 3 channels. But dont wory to much about this, since ww will give an error if the formats doesnt support the selected configuration. Since the file is processed as a 3 channel file, this also means the resampling takes longer since it has to resample an extra channel.

If you have created a couple of mappings which you think are usefull, you can save the "mappings.ini" file to a save place. This is a normal textfile which contains the data for all the mappings. The graphical interface only allows the creation of mappings for 1..10 -> 1..10 channels. But if you wanted a channelmapping for more channels there is an other option. Manually edit the mappings.ini to suit your needs. This way you can go from 1..1000->1..1000 channels. They are accepted by ww, but cant be viewed or edited graphicaly.

If you want to merge an old mapping with a new one, you must close ww, add a new mappings file with the name "mappingsNEW.ini" to the directory and start up ww. If ww has read the file it will rename it to mappingsIMPORTED.ini.

When you are merging files, the file order will be the same as the order in the list. If you want to change the order, you can simply select a file (or multiple) and drag them up or down to change the order.

Well that about all i can say about channelmapping.
If im bored again ill describe the other features (below this post).

----

Edit a new day has arrived.... And this time i'll describe the preferences.

- The first option is to select the output directory. Well nothing to say about that, except that whenever temp files are used (see normalization) the output directory selected will also be used to store the temp files.

- Process delay
When you add a file with the name "somefileDELAY 1500.wav"
ww will add a delay of 1500 msec to the file when this option is enabled. When using negative values it wil cut away samples from the begining.

- Maintain length
If you want to add a delay but dont want to change the length of a file check this option. It will add silence or remove samples from the end of the file depending on if you added a negative or positive delay

- 32bit float CE compatible
For some reason somebody had the bright idea to make files with a 32 bit int wav header and then to fill it with floats. Since there is no way to tell from the header if its a 32bit int or float, ww can never be sure if its dealing with a 32 bit int or float. If you enable this option it will analyse the wav data to see what kind of file it is. Since this is just guessing, you should only enable this option when your conversion comes out wrong. If you disable this option all 32 bit wav pcm files will be treated as 32 bit int wav files.

- ignore size in header
If you add a wav file with an invallid size in the header, the file will not be recognized by ww. To ignore the size in the header enable this option. If you do this all data after the data chunk will be used as sampledata. When you create files bigger then 4gb ww will set the size (in the wavheader) to 0 since the wav header cant store the real size for such large files. So when you want to work such large files you should enable this option.


- enable channelmapping
This will enable or disable all channel mappings. This same option is also in the channelmapping configuration dialog.

- Stream manipulation
* Mono streams
will convert all mutlichannel files to monostreams

* Stitch files
Will stitch all file together in the order as they appear in the main dialog. All files must have the same sampletype, samplerate and number of channels. It is possible to use a channelmaping, convert the sampletype or rate to let all the files have the same properties. If you add i.e. 5 stereo files into the list and stich them together, you get a single stereo file which has the length off all the files combined.

* Merge files
This option will merge all files in the main dialog to a single multichannel file with the length of the longest file, and with the number of channels equal to the total number of channels from all files in the dialog. So selecting merge on 6 mono files will create a single 6 channel file with the length of the longest file in the list.

- Output format
Not really much to say about. Select wavePCM for maximum compatibility.

- Convert sampletype
...

- Convert samplerate
...


- Sound level control
There are 3 different ways to influence the sound level:

* amplify
Will increase (or decrease) the volume on all files with the number of dB entered in the dB box.

* Normalize
Will first convert find the highest peak, and adjust the volume so the peak will get the desired level. Normalising can be done by file,list or whenever clipping is detected.

* Normalize with temp file
This wil function exactly the same as the normalizing without temp file. But because the result from the first pass is saved (in 64 bit resolution) it only has to convert the sample type in the second pass. This can greatly increase the speed when normalizing and resampling. One exeception to this is the normalise when clipping. Since ww cant know in advance which file will clip, nromalizing with temp file + on clipping will always do two passes. If after the first pass no clipping is detected, it will convert the temp file normaly to the desired output format. If clipping is detected, it will lower the volume.


* dithering
Will dither the output file. If you dont know what it is, try google. It not something i can explain in 2 sentences . Currently only the dithering amplitude can be changed. A dithering amp of 1 means it will add diher with a max peak of +/- 1 LSB to the file. So for 8 bit int this is 1/128. Dithering will only be applied when
a) sampels are converted to floating point and
b) if the output format is of int type. This is because dithering doesnt make any sence on floatig point.

Well thats all for now .

Last edited by johnman; 8th November 2006 at 14:19.
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