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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Hi,
I bought the audiophile version and notice that my bb folder seems to have both the wav and wma versions of every loop/sample.
I don't pretend that I have that great of ears. I can tell when an mp3 is made of an mp3, but mp3/wma's sound pretty good by themselves.
Since I can't hear the difference, I'm wanting to verify that when I render a track that BIAB is pulling the wav files and not the wma files. Is there a way to do this? (when I search the help index and search functions the word 'audiophile' turns up, essentially nothing.)
Thanks,
Ian
Last edited by Ian Ferrin; 04/11/13 06:48 AM.
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Yes, this is the way BIAB works. If there is a .WAV file, it uses that; otherwise it uses the .WMA file. In fact, you could delete the .WMA file as a test and you would hear no difference.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Matt, I don't have the Audiophile version but I'm wondering, if I converted the WMA files to WAV would it speed up the rendering at all? Quality shouldn't be any different, but if it speeds up the process, it might be worth it.
Thanks
Rich
Windows 10, 64 bit | BIAB 2019 PlusPak | Studio One 2 Artist
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You can convert the WMA to WAV, but it's going to take a whole lot more disk space on your computer (like 10x more, if I remember correctly, but someone can correct me on that). And any updates you get from PGMusic along the way are going to be WMA's, so you would need to remember to convert those, or you could end up playing the older version. And remember there is a trade-off of size versus performance. Yes, with WAV there is no conversion necessary, but your computer must read a much larger file into memory.
My $0.02 worth.
John Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 2x2TB, 1x4TB SSD Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 2x1.5TB, 2x2TB, 1x4TB SATA BB2025/UMC404HD/Casios/Cakewalk/Reaper/Studio One/MixBus/Notion/Finale/Dorico/Noteworthy/NI/Halion/IK http://www.sus4chord.com
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Rich, I don't know if the process of rendering involves regenerating. I suppose it must. As far as regenerating, yes there is an improvement in speed using .WAV (whether audiophile or just uncompressed) but it is small. When the Elastique algorithm was introduced to RealTracks, the difference in regeneration time became even less.
John is correct, the files expand to roughly 10 or 11 times the size when uncompressed.
I should mention that I don't use rendering, so I'm not a good judge of how long it takes or how to speed that up. I have a Roland Fantom synth so I record in real time.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Quote:
Yes, this is the way BIAB works. If there is a .WAV file, it uses that; otherwise it uses the .WMA file. In fact, you could delete the .WMA file as a test and you would hear no difference.
Thanks Matt,
I figured as much. Do you know if there's a way to tell BIAB to use the wma files instead of the wav?
It seems to me it might be nice to use the wma's while working, and then switch to the wav when rendering. I've had a couple of crashes. They both happened when I was clicking on something while the audio was loading. I'm thinking working w/ the wma's until the rendering process might fix this.
Thanks again,
Ian
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Ian, no, I don't know how you would do that without deleting the .WAV versions, as BIAB uses them if they are present. Besides, as I mentioned, the .WAV files regenerate just a little faster.
I also think you should be looking elsewhere to solve whatever problem you may have. Tell us more details about the crashes.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Thanks for the info Matt,
Re. the crashes, I don't remember the exact circumstances. I've crashed BIAB twice now. I notice that sometimes when rendering that BIAB says 'not responding' for awhile but then recovers. This wasn't that. BIAB crashed twice and didn't recover. During both crashes, the thing I remember was being impatient and clicking on multiple buttons/commands and my recollection is that both crashes occurred while BIAB was loading realstyles. I'm pretty sure I just overloaded it and am not too concerned. If it happens again, I'll make a note of what I was doing and see if I can reproduce the problem.
PS - My brother the artist loves the Hudson Valley. It has a pretty rich Americana history. You live in a pretty nice spot from what I've heard!
Thanks again,
Peace,
Ian
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BIAB just crashed again.
I was auditioning realstyles. I loaded a realstyle. The strings track was muted when I loaded BIAB. I started playing the new style. 3-4 bars into the intro I unmuted the string track and BIAB froze. I gave it a couple of minutes but it didn't recover.
I then went back and tried to recreate the problem. I loaded a style, then muted the strings, then loaded a new style and then unmuted the strings during playback. This time no crash.
So it's an intermittent problem... the worst kind. I will say the first time I had auditioned about 10 different styles before the crash and didn't do that much auditioning the 2nd time.
I realize BIAB is dealing with fairly vast amounts of processing when generating songs from realstyles on the fly. I forgive it. It's a pretty awesome program regardless.
Peace,
Ian
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Quote:
Matt, I don't have the Audiophile version but I'm wondering, if I converted the WMA files to WAV would it speed up the rendering at all? Quality shouldn't be any different, but if it speeds up the process, it might be worth it.
Thanks
Converting the compressed WMA format files to WAV files yields no sonic advantage - because there isn't the "extra" sonic information available from the WMA format.
Converting those files to WAV in an attempt to gain faster loading speed isn't all that important with modern pc's either, I tried it once just to test and found that any loading speed advantage will be slight indeed.
--Mac
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Quote:
Quote:
Matt, I don't have the Audiophile version but I'm wondering, if I converted the WMA files to WAV would it speed up the rendering at all? Quality shouldn't be any different, but if it speeds up the process, it might be worth it.
Thanks
Converting the compressed WMA format files to WAV files yields no sonic advantage - because there isn't the "extra" sonic information available from the WMA format.
Converting those files to WAV in an attempt to gain faster loading speed isn't all that important with modern pc's either, I tried it once just to test and found that any loading speed advantage will be slight indeed.
--Mac
Converting pretty much any digital audio to another format will involve some degradation of the sound. Even if it's from a lossy (wma, mp3) to an uncompressed format (wav, aiff). There's always changes made to the waveform and none of those changes improve the sound. So the answer to your question is don't convert your wma's. The conversion WILL harm your sound, albeit pretty marginally.
As an aside, mixing/rendering your final mix to a wav WILL give you a better sound than mixing to wma. It's because you're summing all those various tracks to an entirely new mix. A wav mix will capture more of the detail intact. A wma mix will capture less detail. It's because you're expanding and then re-compressing compressed files. Even I, with my not exactly 20-something ears can hear this process.
Peace,
Ian
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That ain't it, with all due respect.
Look, the WMA is going to have both a brickwall ceiling in the high frequencies, plus a slight amount of distortion due to artifacts.
You can convert that to .wav format, but the better sampling can only recreate that which is already in the file to begin with, complete with that which is NOT in the file.
Which means that a WAV file of a WMA file is likely going to sound pretty much the same as it would in WMA format, it would just be stored in a MUCH LARGER filesize.
If you want the original WAV files, you should consider the Audiophile version of the program.
That said, I have not found a big enough difference to warrant the extra investment, and with good reason, you see, the Realtracks are only involved with the compression of only one lone instrument at a time in most cases, and those instruments don't really go into the very high audio frequencies all that much anyway. YMMV.
--Mac
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Quote:
That ain't it, with all due respect.
Mac, if this comment is for me, I agree w/ everything you said, and my post above does too. We understand the same thing as far as I can tell.
Peace,
Ian
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