Small App to make sd2 files?

[CharlesL]

Greetings,

While most users and studios are having parties and celebration going on for their newly acquired PT 6.1 LE, miserable me over here is still running the 32track beta on a AGP G4.

Anyway, here's is a feature that I wished they would have included for us, but I guess I have to look for workarounds, and need advice and suggestions on what you guys use for doing this:

Situation is this, sometimes I need to import a huge stereo audio track (ie. 1 hr FINAL AUDIO bounced to stereo wav file) into my current PT session set to SDII (PT LE will import anything that is not sd2 mono, unless the session was created in wav/aif, but still stereo files need to be converted), but all I needed was a small section of this file (maybe 20 secs of a segment).

And I will have to wait for the MAC to convert and import the file, so that i can use this little small portion.

Is there a small freeware / shareware that i can run in the background for such wav/aif to sd2 conversion? Or better still, if i can run it in the background, and just extract the portion i need, into two mono sd2 files?

Of coz an easy traditional way, is to playback the file and then record onto a DAT the portion i need, then rec it back into PT. But i am trying to avoid the hassle of patching things here and there. Any suggestions / tips on what app to use for this?

Also, it'll be nice if such software can do the same thing with an mp3 file too. ie. select a portion of the mp3 file, then convert it to two multiple mono sd2 file.

Thanks and Regards,
[Charles]

[Ben Jenssen]

There’s a handy little freeware thing called Soundapp PPC, wich works great. I’m shure you’ll find it quickly with a search.

[CharlesL]

Greetings Ben,

Thnx for the tips. I've got SoundApps. It's freeware. It does the conversion to sd2 files fine. BUT, it could not extract a small portion of a large file and then just export these as sd2, right?

Is there any other such apps available? Just a thought, can Quicktime Pro do it? I remember seeing somewhere that Quicktime Pro can mark IN and OUT and export, but only to aif or wav and not multiple mono sd2 files..

Thanks and Regards,
[Charles]

[SoundWrangler]

Assuming your 1-hr stereo source file is 16-bit, & assuming you have Toast & a reasonably fast CD burner, here's a dopey workaround that may help:
1. Burn an audio CD from the source file.
2. With this audio CD-R in your CD drive, use the Toast Extractor utility (usually in the "Goodies" folder) to select what portion of this file you want. Click the Option button to select SDII format, & Split mode.
3. Once you hit the Extract button, just choose your destination Session's "Audio Files" folder.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Toast Audio Extractor (or any ripper) will not give you a bit acurate copy of the original sound file.

Rail

[CharlesL]

Hmm, going the Toast Extractor route is a bit of inconvenience too. It's like routing the signal to DAT and recording it back into Pro Tools..

I think what I am looking for, is something like SoundApp, but with the option to mark IN and OUT, and extract only regions that I want into multiple mono sd2 files.

[byteme]

I believe Peak can do what you need.
AJ

[John H]

You can convert portions of audio files including CD Tracks to any format you want using applescript and soundApp. I'll throw something together sometime over the weekend and email it to you or post a link to it here if you prefer.

The only down side of using soundApp is that it seems to convert everything to 16 bit [img]images/icons/confused.gif[/img]

[CharlesL]

Peak ? oh, I did a quick check and found Bias PEAK LE and BIAS DECK LE .. will it do the trick? can I run it together with PT LE? can i extract just regions of it into sd2 multiple monos?

John>> that's very clever of you. Apple Script and Sound App ?? how does it work? do i need to customise the "script" everytime i need to extract a certain region of a huge aif/wav file? Can it be programmed to audition the file first, so that i can select the region i need? sounds cool. Tell me more abt your findings.

Thanks !!

<EDITED>
After thinking about it, I think if John can help us out with Apple scripts and how to configure/customise it, I think it will be brilliant. Coz, if i were to use PEAK or DECK LE, I might have to go through the hassle of waiting for it to import/convert the AIF into the program, and then exporting the region. I might as well do everything inside Protools.

Meanwhile, lemme do a little search on APPLE SCRIPTS and see if it is something easily figured out by some non-programmers like myself [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[CharlesL]

Hi again,

I searched the web and found out there is a SCRIPT EDITOR in my system already.

I also found there are some help and syntax for Apple Scripts.

But, I do not know how to make one that will work properly, ie. what to type for "convert ..." "start at time" and "stop at time"

Also, is "time" in "hh:mm:ss" or "hh:mm:ss:frames" ??

Please give me an example or a template.

Thanks so much!!

Regards.