Wavelab DSD Version

Would such a thing ever be feasible?

Unlikely.

Why unlikely? I purchased a Tascam DA-3000 this weekend and my choices are limited if I want to convert my DSD captures to anything else. Why wouldn’t it be possible? Why wouldn’t Steinberg want Wavelab to support this high quality format and yet support lesser quality formats? For a professional product, not supporting this file format is a glaring omission to me.

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This is not “yet another file format”, this is a completely different way to encode audio samples. This means, much work, much cost,… is this worth it?..

I would find it beneficial since I have hardware that produces these files. Consider it a request though highly doubtful one request will justify implementation :frowning:

1-bit DSD is actually a less-good quality format; the variants with more bits avoid the most damaging issues, but are still no better than PCM. Processing DSD is extremely difficult; in fact, the DAWs that handle it convert to PCM to do any processing! If the processing is localised, like cross-fades, the conversion is only done locally, but any processing of the whole file will convert it.

Paul

My ears say otherwise. Not just my ears either.

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There are, as I understand it, hardly any DSD editing systems available.

You could look at this system: http://www.superaudiocenter.com/Products.htm to gain an appreciation of the specialisation required of a DAW that is capable of editing DSD. And, even these very expensive systems have limitations (like no plug in support for example).

Weiss SaraCon offers very high end DSD conversion to PCM.

No argument that DSD sounds great. The point really is maybe that there are few that have the expectation of kids popping DSD tracks on their iPhone at this stage. So, perhaps Weiss and Mytek are on the right commercial path focusing on high quality conversion to PCM for end use.

Paul’s right. It doesn’t seem very practical, but it would definitely be pretty cool. One of the reasons I originally asked was because of this old article speculating about DSD support in Cubase in 2005: DSD Support In Cubase?
And there are more sites selling DSD albums now, like Acoustic Sounds.
Sonoma and Pyramix with DSD are rather expensive, and I guess Sadie has dropped out. But it seems the way Pyramix is doing it is built on top of a 352 KHz PCM editing system, so how hard could that be right? (easy for me to say). And I’ve gotten plugins to work up there. And I guess Pyramix does too. But as Paul probably knows, the Sonoma doesn’t do it that way, so no VST plugins. But I’ve wondered if Sonoma has any sort of built in EQ because I’ve heard it converts to 8 bit (?) 2.6MHz to insert edits and fades, so I think that would be considered processing.
I would expect a DSD Wavelab version to be more expensive, and I wouldn’t expect it to appear in any normal version. But it would be interesting.

Let’s step back a moment because this is going way off base. All I want to do is convert my DSD recordings captured on my Tascam DA-3000 to the more friendly formats such as WAV, MP3, etc. I don’t care about editing in the DSD format if that makes this request easier. I just want a way to convert it.

I second that: Convert from DSD files. I would add convert TO DSD files, because that would make it practical to use Wavelab to convert/edit-process/convert at very high rates, as one of the other programa does. In the mean time, you might want to try JRiver ($50) to convert, if the other conversion options aren’t practical.

Or Foobar (with the DSDIFF component plugin). (free) (no twitter req.). I forgot about that file converter.