Some suggestions, enhancements for Acoustica

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Gades wrote: Mon Nov 29, 2021 7:25 pm I sent an example multitrack file from RodeCaster Pro to "info at" e-mail. I think the best solution for support this kind of file would be import as multisession, as separate tracks :)
Thanks for that! I've checked the file and it is a standard 14 channel wave file. Acoustica Premium Edition is currently limited to maximum 8 channels in the clip editor. The best way would be to open this in as a multitrack session, but I don't know if these channels can be grouped together in e.g. stereo pairs? I see that there's a "JUNK" tag in the file. These are used to store additional data that other applications shouldn't care about. It is possible that RØDE stores some additional information there. If there is no additional information there, Acoustica won't be able to tell a multi-channel file from a multi-track file. I'll reach out to RØDE and ask for more information.

Best,
Stian

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cmstrike wrote: Tue Nov 30, 2021 8:07 pm I'll piggyback on this thread as well. I just got the Post Production Suite and I'm absolutely loving these tools so far!
Thanks, very glad to hear that you like them!
cmstrike wrote: Tue Nov 30, 2021 8:07 pmOne thing I'd love to be able to do in Acoustica is view the waveplot and spectrogram at the same time, either vertically stacked in separate windows on top of one another (like in Adobe Audition), or with the waveplot layered over the spectrogram (like in iZotope RX).
You're not the first to request this and we'll look into this.
cmstrike wrote: Tue Nov 30, 2021 8:07 pmI'd also love to be able to highlight a selection and quickly process a volume change, for example. It's helpful to be able to assign that to a shortcut and just highlight and lower/raise a section without having to open a tool window and click "Process".
Are you thinking along the lines of a floating tool palette or simply keyboard shortcuts?

Best,
Stian

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Logga wrote: Tue Nov 30, 2021 10:50 pm One more: support for less common bit depths for FLAC, WAV and AIFF

Currently you can't save these formats at 20 bit, for example, even though they support it.
Why would it be useful? Well, there could be several reasons... 20 bit kinda makes sense for many recordings. A common use for 20 bit is/was DVD-Audio. And there are debates about "hi-res" music and how 16 bit doesn't quite satisfy the audiophiles, while 24 bit is overkill and a waste of space. Maybe 20 bit could become a happy medium in the future. There aren't many programs that can encode to 20 bit, so Acoustica would have an advantage. :)
FLAC also supports 12 bit and 32 bit (integer), which are also currently unavailable.

And there some problems with opening 20 bit files in Acoustica.
Here's a 20 bit FLAC sample: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7usa8tob7cem3 ... .flac?dl=1
If you open it in Acoustica there's missing bit depth info.
If you open a 20 bit WAV in Acoustica it says it's 24 bit. (Reaper and foobar2000 both say it's 20 bit, so I don't think it's an encoding problem.)
And opening a 20 bit AIFF fails and makes Acoustica hang.
Thanks, I wasn't aware that FLAC supported 20 bits, but that does in fact seem to be the case. As far as I know, both RIFF (WAV) and AIFF require an integer number of bytes. You can define define the number of bits actually in use, but that doesn't change the storage requirements so it's not really beneficial. How did you encode the 20 bit AIFF file? Those are rare, I guess, and I'd like to try to reproduce the issue with Acoustica hanging.

Best,
Stian

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The 20 bit AIFF file was encoded with foobar2000. You can dl it here: https://www.sendspace.com/file/pp541l
(Acoustica hangs when trying to close the tab/window.)

EDIT: The situation is similar with 12 bit FLAC/WAV/AIFF. But the AIFF file doesn't make Acoustica hang, it just doesn't load. (12 bit AIFF samples here).

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stian wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 2:23 pm Are you thinking along the lines of a floating tool palette or simply keyboard shortcuts?
Thanks for the response! I was thinking specifically of a function that you could assign to a keyboard shortcut, but either way would be very handy. I always appreciated the floating volume knob on an audio file in Adobe Audition.

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stian wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 1:21 pm Thanks for that! I've checked the file and it is a standard 14 channel wave file. Acoustica Premium Edition is currently limited to maximum 8 channels in the clip editor. The best way would be to open this in as a multitrack session, but I don't know if these channels can be grouped together in e.g. stereo pairs? I see that there's a "JUNK" tag in the file. These are used to store additional data that other applications shouldn't care about. It is possible that RØDE stores some additional information there. If there is no additional information there, Acoustica won't be able to tell a multi-channel file from a multi-track file. I'll reach out to RØDE and ask for more information.
Best,
Stian
Hi, RodeCaster multichannel file is build from 14 channels:
1-2 - stereo master track
3 - mono track, mic 1
4 - mono track, mic 2
5 - mono track, mic 3
6 - mono track, mic 4
7-8 - stereo track for USB/computer input
9-10 - stereo track for TRRS/smartphone input
11-12 - stereo track for Bluetooth input
13-14 - stereo track for internal sound pads

The best usage of these file would be import as multichannel session, with tracks separated like above, maybe with dialog option to select imported tracks (e.g. only mic1, mic2 and sound pads) ;)

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Logga wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:41 pm The 20 bit AIFF file was encoded with foobar2000. You can dl it here: https://www.sendspace.com/file/pp541l
(Acoustica hangs when trying to close the tab/window.)

EDIT: The situation is similar with 12 bit FLAC/WAV/AIFF. But the AIFF file doesn't make Acoustica hang, it just doesn't load. (12 bit AIFF samples here).
Thanks for this! Acoustica has a built-in AIFF decoder which refuses to load resolutions other than 8, 16, 24 or 32 bit. Since both AIFF and RIFF WAVE files can contain audio encoded with arbitrary codecs, Acoustica fall backs to Windows Media Foundation (MF) for decoding. Unfortunately, MF seems to freeze when loading 20 bit audio as you report.

There's no benefit of using 20 bit AIFF since individual audio samples are grouped in bytes, but I'll make sure that Acoustica doesn't freeze by extending the internal AIFF decoder to support 20 bit.

20 bit FLAC is indeed an interesting option, though.

Best,
Stian

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cmstrike wrote: Tue Dec 07, 2021 5:10 pm Thanks for the response! I was thinking specifically of a function that you could assign to a keyboard shortcut, but either way would be very handy. I always appreciated the floating volume knob on an audio file in Adobe Audition.
Ok, thanks for elaborating!

Best,
Stian

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stian wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 2:00 pm
Logga wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:41 pm The 20 bit AIFF file was encoded with foobar2000. You can dl it here: https://www.sendspace.com/file/pp541l
(Acoustica hangs when trying to close the tab/window.)

EDIT: The situation is similar with 12 bit FLAC/WAV/AIFF. But the AIFF file doesn't make Acoustica hang, it just doesn't load. (12 bit AIFF samples here).
Thanks for this! Acoustica has a built-in AIFF decoder which refuses to load resolutions other than 8, 16, 24 or 32 bit. Since both AIFF and RIFF WAVE files can contain audio encoded with arbitrary codecs, Acoustica fall backs to Windows Media Foundation (MF) for decoding. Unfortunately, MF seems to freeze when loading 20 bit audio as you report.

There's no benefit of using 20 bit AIFF since individual audio samples are grouped in bytes, but I'll make sure that Acoustica doesn't freeze by extending the internal AIFF decoder to support 20 bit.

20 bit FLAC is indeed an interesting option, though.

EDIT: Just fixed the 20 bit AIFF import... :)

Best,
Stian

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Hi!
Gades wrote: Wed Dec 08, 2021 5:32 pm Hi, RodeCaster multichannel file is build from 14 channels:
1-2 - stereo master track
3 - mono track, mic 1
4 - mono track, mic 2
5 - mono track, mic 3
6 - mono track, mic 4
7-8 - stereo track for USB/computer input
9-10 - stereo track for TRRS/smartphone input
11-12 - stereo track for Bluetooth input
13-14 - stereo track for internal sound pads

The best usage of these file would be import as multichannel session, with tracks separated like above, maybe with dialog option to select imported tracks (e.g. only mic1, mic2 and sound pads) ;)
Thanks for this! Unfortunately, we cannot just assume that 14 channel .wav files have this channel layout, so we would need to extract this information from the file itself, somehow.

Best,
Stian

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stian wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 2:09 pm Just fixed the 20 bit AIFF import.
:tu:


Regarding 20 bit FLAC encoding: I came to the conclusion that it might not be worth it, after all. I mean it wouldn't hurt, but the reality right now is that there's software out there that can't decode 20 bit FLAC, because it's such a rarely used format.
So it's probably better to just reduce the bit depth (with dithering) and then save the file in the more common 24 bit FLAC format, at least for public distribution.

And on that note, it might be good to add more bit depth steps in Acon's Dither plugin. I was thinking at least 18 and 22 bit, but why not just add every step between 16 and 24, because there's surely someone out there who wants exactly 21 bits. :)
EDIT: in fact, even some lower steps (13,14,15) could come handy, since they can sound surprisingly good with noise shaping. If you think it's too many and it would look messy, maybe the user could have the option to type in the desired value?

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stian wrote: Thu Dec 09, 2021 2:11 pm Thanks for this! Unfortunately, we cannot just assume that 14 channel .wav files have this channel layout, so we would need to extract this information from the file itself, somehow.
I understand, especially Tascam MixCast 4 also produces 14 channel wav file with another configuration (e.g. first 4 channels contain mic data)...

But... What if the import window would allow the user to configure channels? And RodeCaster Pro or Tascam MixCast would have own "preset configurations"? :)

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Gades wrote: Fri Dec 17, 2021 12:08 pm I understand, especially Tascam MixCast 4 also produces 14 channel wav file with another configuration (e.g. first 4 channels contain mic data)...

But... What if the import window would allow the user to configure channels? And RodeCaster Pro or Tascam MixCast would have own "preset configurations"? :)
Thinking about it, I think the best way would be to add this functionality to the audio clip import in multitrack sessions. If the imported audio has more channels the session, there could be an option to split the audio over multiple tracks.

Best,
Stian

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stian wrote: Thu Dec 23, 2021 12:55 pm Thinking about it, I think the best way would be to add this functionality to the audio clip import in multitrack sessions. If the imported audio has more channels the session, there could be an option to split the audio over multiple tracks.
Yes, I think this would be the best solution!

happy new year!

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Hi Stian,

I recently purchased Acoustica Premium and it has really helped improve and speed up my workflow. I edit and master long form audio for audiobooks and I also mix ADR.

Something I would like to see to improve it even more is to have 2 things in the analysis show statistcs: 1, a maximum trough value to show the lowest value in DB mainly to quickly find audio drop outs and 2 to show an RMS trough or noise floor.

Thanks for hearing this sugestion an keep up the great work.

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