Subject:pro tools aiff

Posted by: spun

Date:7/7/2002 1:58:04 PM

I've just finished a studio recording session with protools. The engineer has provided CDs of all the audio data files that were generated (aiff). This was so we could master and arrange individual sound files at our own leisure in our own sequencing programme. I was planning to use SoundForge and cubase for this. Unfortunately i can't open these in sound forge (v6.0), or import them into Cubase.In sound forge i get the error message "The file is an unsupported format.The file ... could not be opened". does anyone have a solution to this problem? Can this be done?
harry

Subject:RE: pro tools aiff

Reply by: dcomo

Date:7/7/2002 2:27:08 PM

Aiff files are standard files just like .wav files. I have passed Aiff files between sound programs on different platforms without issues in the past. What type of machine was in the studio (as in PC or MAC), what version of ProTools is installed in the studio and what version of Sound Forge are you trying to open it up in??

Once you tell me the details, I can probably paste together an idea on why this is happening...

Subject:RE: pro tools aiff

Reply by: Rednroll

Date:7/7/2002 3:38:06 PM

When you back up from ProTools on a MAC, you must make sure the CDrom is an IBM format (ie ISO 9660). I've run into problems in the past where I did this and still had the problems you are incurring, because the app saving the file type was incorrectly saving the file format. For example, I used Spark to save AIFF and .WAV files and then burned them to a ISO 9660 disk and no PC would recognize the files. I then used "WAVE CONVERT" to save as either AIFF or .WAV and burned the same files and had no problems backing up and opening on a PC. Maybe proTools has this same issue. I think "Wave Convert" is a free tool for the MAC. First step is to insure you are backing the files to a ISO 9660 cdrom. Macs can read IBM format disks, but not the other way around.

Subject:RE: pro tools aiff

Reply by: spun

Date:7/8/2002 2:51:48 AM

Thanks for the useful advice, it sounds like it may be due to the engineer burning a Mac specific CD-R, i.e, not an ISO 9660 or Mac/PC hybrid. The studio was using protools 5.1 for Mac, and burned the pro tools session with 'Toast' without (i suspect) performing any PC-relevant conversions. I had to use MacOpener to even view the list of files on the CD, so i suspect that my problems may be due to this.

However, I've just read the following on the Protools support page at digidesign.com in response to a similar query as my own (no reference was made to Sound Forge in the post):

"Pro Tools generated wave files are in full compliance with the WAV file standard. However some applications which claim to support the wav standard don't actually fully support it. They may read simple wav files (containing only format information and PCM data) but may fail to handle broadcast wave compliant files which contain additional meta data in the header such as the region definitions used by Pro Tools"

I'm using Sound Forge v6 - can this version handle "broadcast wave compliant files", whatever they are? I'm going to ask the engineer to export the protools audio tracks session as windows PCM wav files. Hopefully (fingers crossed!) this will do the trick.


Harry

Subject:RE: pro tools aiff

Reply by: Rednroll

Date:7/8/2002 1:22:05 PM

Toast is what I used to do my backups from MAC, therefore I know there's an option to burn the format as an ISO 9660 disc.

Subject:RE: pro tools aiff

Reply by: spun

Date:7/9/2002 6:05:42 AM

I've now managed to solve this problem.. thanks for all help. Protools saves audio as SDII files by default. SoundForge cannot open this file type. It was solved by going back to protools, selecting all the tracks and then exporting them as Windows PCM wav files, simple really! Perhaps a useful checkpoint for other musicians who encounter this type problem?

Subject:RE: pro tools aiff

Reply by: SonyTSW

Date:7/10/2002 11:40:38 PM

What also may work for you is to use the raw file type plugin to read the sd2 files in Forge 6. It does require that you know something about what the settings were when they were recorded.

Use File | Open and set the type dropdown to "Raw File (*.*)". Open your .sd2 file and a dialog will come up that allows you to set the sample rate, format, byte ordering, etc. to use for reading the file.

For example, we received some sd2 files here that were used for loop library development. The settings we needed to use to read them were: 44,1000 Hz, 24-bit PCM, Big endian (Motorola), Mono, header and trailer both = 0.