Is there a quick way to transfer the info shown in my screen shot from one montage to another?
Basically, I still assemble my main montage at 44.1k with 44.1k files, even if I capture each song at higher sample rates because I like to use iZotope SRC for the sample rate conversion to 44.1k, I like to do any sample rate conversion before the final limiter, and I don’t want to have Crystal Resampler running live on DDP or file renders. So I always assemble a montage at the desired end sample rate.
Anyway, when I need to recreate a montage higher than 44.1k for a vinyl pre-master, or if a client wants higher than 44.1k digital masters (if higher sample rate exists) for bandcamp or Mastered For iTunes then I have to do a lot of manual work to recreate the montage at higher sample rate because the track ID markers and other things are tied to the samples of the montage rather than absolute time. I have found a slow workaround but demand for 44.1k and native sample rate versions is increasing and I don’t want to convert after final limiting or run Crystal Resampler live.
Doing Save As… and converting the sample rate of a montage isn’t hard, and I’m used to doing “replace audio file…” for each clip and pointing Wavelab to the high sample rate version so that isn’t a big problem (although it could be faster with Wavelab enhancements).
The thing that takes the most time is redoing the clip placement times (and track IDs which follow clips if you do it right) as shown in the attachment. I have to enter all the clip start/end and pre-gap times manually and the numerical entry isn’t very smooth on OSX, the cursor seems to jump around a bit if you’re too slow and you can’t copy and paste the entire times. If I could easily copy and paste each full time, or a row of times (all the possible times for a clip) it would be a huge help.
The hack seems like it could be faster than what I am doing now, even if I could more quickly copy/paste those clip values from the 44.1k montage to the new higher sample rate montage.
Seems like a lot of arithmetic and shuffling for such a common task (these days Crystals long in tooth while targets vary). Kind of a bummer: we have easy access to multiple targets, but multiple sources remain a dream.
This would be very useful. Delivering different masters has become more and more often, and not having to redo the editing would be great. Of course one could edit everything before downsampling, but that isn’t the way I work either.
Right. I get the theory of starting high and downsampling as needed, but I feel most comfortable delivering masters to clients at 44.1k via DDP or otherwise. Once I approved, if higher sample rate versions are available and needed for vinyl, bandcamp, or MFiT, a way to get up to that rate without redoing a lot of work would be amazing.
I also prefer to SRC outside of Wavelab so SRC isn’t happening live on renders requiring a double check and longer rendering times.
It sounds like a solution is coming in WL9 and PG has posted a hack workaround which I have yet to try but I think it could be a temporary workflow improvement.
I finally had time to try this out. I don’t know that it’ll be much faster than manually recreating the montage at a higher sample rate but maybe if I try a few times I can more quickly find all the fields I need to alter the numbers.
I did get hung up on step 4 I think. I found the XXX fields, but I’m sure of what to change to. If my original montages are always 44.1k, can you tell me the relationship of the 44.1k number to 48k, 88.2k. I believe you’re saying that 217687 @ 96k = 100000 @ 44.1k
Does the pos field allow for decimal points because I think my new pos numbers for 48k will not be even numbers but something like 108843.5
My apologies if you’re doing it this way already, but there should be a “Find and Replace with… - all occurances” in most text editors to do all of the finds and replaces for you automatically. Also, if your soundfile names are standardized, it seems they could be replaced all at once this way too.
Sorry, just realized the numbers are unique values. Maybe PG or somebody could come up with a ‘function’ find and replace that could work in a text editor or spreadsheet. I wouldn’t want to do what you’re doing manually.
Yeah, I was just using the basic Mac OSX Text Editor and it wasn’t a quick process. I’ll look into the “replace all occurrences” thing. Do you have a recommended text editor?
It seems that the POS thing is dependent on the montage itself and quite a bit of math would go into altering the number for each one.
I’m thinking that my original way could be faster. I just make a screen shot of the 44.1k montage clip times, and then go through and enter that in for the 48k version after I’ve changed the montage to higher sample rate and imported the higher sample rate version.
I’m definitely looking forward to a proper feature in WL9 for this.
The tags must be sample positions and therefor unique for each marker. Ofcourse ‘Replace’ could still be used for the other part, replacing 44100 instances with 96000 ones.
And for the calculation part you’d need a script or somesuch that replaces anything between xxxxx with a recalculated value. The factor for 44100 to 96000 would be 2.17687xxx (new samplerate divided by old samplerate) rounded off to the nearest sample…
Yup. Precision isn’t terribly critical from 44.1 > 96K, since the new rate has more samples in the same time slice, but the other direction might require special handling, consistently erring to one side or the other of a mark, based on type if you’re particularly anal. But to a great degree the value of the divisor can compensate and make it always “more” right.
PG: would it be dangerous to search/replace inside a WL 8.5 Montage document, rather than the XML file dance? It would be quite elegant and easy to resolve this request for mac users with an Automator droplet that diddles the WL 8.5 doc directly, rather than the import/export thing.
As Daved and Arjan said, it should be scriptable. I haven’t tried Automator except for the most basic built in commands. Daved, is it basically Apple Script? I could script the calculation replaces in Filemaker, but that doesn’t help anybody without Filemaker.
In Mac TextEdit, as Arjan said, the other 2 things should be easily Find/Replace. From the Edit Menu, select “Find” or “Replace” (I think, I’m not there).
Find: 44100
Replace with: 96000
(replace all)
for the soundfile names, if your 44 and 96 file names follow a convention, and they’re in the same folder, they should be replaceable:
If the names are:
Song 1.96k.wav
Song 1.441k.wav
Find: 441k
Replace with: 96k
(replace all)
If they’re in different folders and have the same file names, you could find and replace all the folder paths I guess.
As for the time consuming part, (the part), I think others could script in Automator much better than I, but I’ll take a look at it this weekend.
My only other question, aren’t the for the Markers only? Don’t you need the clip beginning (and/or end) positions recalculated too? I haven’t tried this with a real XML export/modify/import so not sure.
I would assume so, but didn’t look into it. It seems a generic tag for anything related to sample position, so it should work with clip start and end etc.
If anybody does happen to come up with a script to automate this in the meantime, it would be amazing. It seems like there is a reasonable demand to change a montage from 44.1k up to the native file sample rate for vinyl pre-masters and MFiT stuff.
I didn’t mind replacing the 41000 with 48000 but the POS numbers for each file/song seems very tedious and involving a lot of math depending on the new sample rate.
Do we know if the POS fields accept decimal points? It seems that for certain values, a decimal point is likely, unless rounding up and double checking the new montage works best.
