Question about aiff support

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scorysto
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Question about aiff support

Post by scorysto » Thu Sep 11, 2008 4:27 am

Sometimes I use Soundtrack Pro to edit certain projects. Soundtrack allows to export a multi-channel aiff everytime i try and open anything with more than just a stereo track audacity crashes. Should it be able to open a multi-channel aiffs and if it can what could be causing my problems.

kozikowski
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Re: Question about aiff support

Post by kozikowski » Thu Sep 11, 2008 9:27 pm

Apple uses this new little-endian AIFF type as its standard on Mac OS X. When a file is imported to or exported from iTunes in "AIFF" format, it is actually AIFF-C/sowt that is being used. When audio from an audio CD disc is imported by dragging to the Mac OS X Desktop, the resulting file is also an AIFF-C/sowt. In all cases, Apple refers to the files simply as "AIFF", and uses the ".aiff" extension.

Since Audacity is multi-platform, it supports the original, universal AIFF format which I believe supports neither multi-channel nor compression. One of the notes about this format claims that if you cross them by accident, the application may crash.

Koz

scorysto
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Re: Question about aiff support

Post by scorysto » Fri Sep 12, 2008 12:08 am

I was not aware of the bug with aiff-c files. I will have to see how Soundtrack saves its files out if uses the same sowt or not. That is most likely it. But the orginal aiff specs did support multiple channels. A nice article on it can be found here. http://www-mmsp.ece.mcgill.ca/Documents ... /AIFF.html And my files weren't compressed. But they did have six channels. I will check to see if my files were aiff-c or just a true aiff. But the short answer is that Audacity doesn't support multi-channel aiff files?

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