Recording sound to hard disk and mirroring to DVD-RAM......

[Kevin Sorensen]

I am i correct in thinking that recordings made with the latest machines ( SD , Deva , Cantar , PD606 ) are supposed to be absolutely quiet , upon playback , ie. no noise what so ever from the media , even with recordings of very low level sounds ?

1/4 inch tape has a little hiss as I remember .

Kevin Sorensen 

[Jeff Wexler]

With digital recordings of any sort at proper sample rate and bit depth, there should be no equivalent to modulation noise (tape hiss) heard. The media itself, whether it be a hard drive, an optical disk, solid state memory, whatever, is just a storage medium. Most of these devices do make acoustical noise, hard drives and optical drives spin and so forth, but the audio (which is digital data) should not exhibit any noise introduced by the "recording process" --- in other words, no noise that was not present at the source being recorded. There is measurable noise, low level dither, in all digital recordings, but this is usually almost indiscernible in relation to even extremely low signal levels.

I don't know if this answers your question or not.

-  Jeff Wexler

[Jeff Wexler]

I have been playing back DVD-RAM tests , mostly me talking or reading , on a mac power book G4 and i also connect the the mac to the home stereo with JBL speakers

Kevin Sorensen

I don't quite understand the setup. Are you trying to actually PLAY off the DVD-RAM disk on your Mac? Normally you would transfer (copy) the files off the DVD-RAM disk and then play them using some software program that can read the files (.wav files typically). This software could be as simple as Quicktime player on the Mac or Windows Media whatever on a PC, and those files should play back just fine. To hear that audio, the headphone jack output is not necessarily the best choice. A Firewire or USB interface or an alternate line level out (depending on what model Mac you are using) would clean up the signal path. If you are in fact trying to play out from the DVD-RAM disk there are all sorts of other issues you could encounter. If you are doing this, what application launches when you try and play off the disk? Is it Quicktime that launches, iTunes, DVD Player?

-  Jeff Wexler

[Guest jimg]

Hi, Kevin

iTunes and Quicktime won't open WAV files with more than 2 tracks. Audacity does a fine job with files with more than 2 tracks, and I'm sure Sound Studio will too. I try to avoid iTunes mostly because it will take a long time looking for album art, etc. at some point. Set the default application to open WAV files to whatever you prefer and use an interface as Jeff suggested. You will be much happier and interfacing the computer to an external system will work much better.

Best regards,

Jim

[John Steigerwald]

Jim ,

Thank you so much . I'll be out shopping for an interface today !

Kevin

If you only need two channels, check out the SD USBPre.  Been using one for years and I love it.

[wbrisett]

iTunes and Quicktime won't open WAV files with more than 2 tracks.

I'm not exactly sure what QuickTime is doing, but on multi-channel BWAV files, QT in Finder does play them, but I'm not sure if is simply doing an "on-the-fly" two channel mixdown, or playing the first two channels, or what, but it will play poly BWAV files without a problem.

Wayne

[Guest jimg]

I'm not exactly sure what QuickTime is doing, but on multi-channel BWAV files, QT in Finder does play them, but I'm not sure if is simply doing an "on-the-fly" two channel mixdown, or playing the first two channels, or what, but it will play poly BWAV files without a problem.

Wayne

Wayne,

You are right. QT will open them, but you can't hear anything other than the first 2 tracks. At least the last time I checked. That was a while ago - QT 6 I think, in 2005. I' haven't needed to play back a file with a higher track count than 2 on the computer in a while.

Best regards,

Jim

[Richard Lightstone, CAS]

As mentioned previously in this post thread: http://www.jwsound.net/SMF/index.php?topic=1997.0

Try Snapper here is the demo link.

http://www.audioease.com/Pages/Snapper/introducing-snapper.html

When you click on the audio file, snapper opens and will play all the tracks in that poly file.

RL

[takev]

You can use the Audio MIDI Setup utility to assign which set of outputs will be the default outputs of the OS. So if you can for example assign the 8 analogue audio outputs of the MOTU to be default. The QuickTime player can play use all those 8 channels to play. Within QuickTime player you can use cmd-J to open a menu and select which track to be played to which output.

Annoyingly you have to do this for each audio file you want to play.

Cheers,

  Take

[wbrisett]

Within QuickTime player you can use cmd-J to open a menu and select which track to be played to which output.

Wow! I just learned a cool new trick. Thanks Take!

Wayne