Strange aiff files

[Atte]

Hi

I'm having trouble opening a few aiff files, that were send to me by
someone. They were originally part of a recording session in (I think)
protools on a mac. Probably they were saved to CDR and handed over to
the windows user that has mailed them to me. They are longish bounces of
vocal takes.

Anyways, the problem is that they open different each time. Sometimes
the first part is missing, sometimes the last part. I tried opening them
in both mhwaveedit and Renoise. The sender checked and the files have
exactly the correct content on her computer.

What could be the problem here? Is it in fact something else that I
didn't think of that is at play?

I don't know about renoise, but isn't it so that almost every audio app
is using libsndfile for opening/converting-from aiff files? So I should
expect similar results in all apps, or?

Is there a way to check the problematic files to get closer to the
problem? Is there a conversion I should try (tried my a2wav script that
uses mplayer, still some parts missing).

NB: This is with a super-fresh install of ubuntu 9.10

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[Erik de Castro Lopo-10]

Atte André Jensen wrote:

> Is there a way to check the problematic files to get closer to the
> problem?

What does

   sndfile-info <filename>

say about this file?

Erik
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[Atte]

Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:

> What does
>
>    sndfile-info <filename>
>
> say about this file?

Hey, cool command! Seems it was saved from Logic, not protools as I wrote...

atte@vestbjerg:~/music/renoise/projects/lunatunes$ sndfile-info
audio_31_1.aif

Version : libsndfile-1.0.20

========================================
File : audio_31_1.aif
Length : 24773120
FORM : 24773112
  AIFF
  COMT : 410
   count  : 1
    time   : 0x0
    marker : 0
    length : 19
    string :  Creator: Logic Pro
  COMM : 18
   Sample Rate : 44100
   Frames      : 8257536
   Channels    : 1
   Sample Size : 24
   Encoding    : NONE
  CHAN : 32 (unknown marker)
  SSND : 24772616
   Offset     : 0
   Block Size : 0

----------------------------------------
Sample Rate : 44100
Frames      : 8257536
Channels    : 1
Format      : 0x00020003
Sections    : 1
Seekable    : TRUE
Duration    : 00:03:07.246
Signal Max  : 3.10893e+06 (-8.62 dB)

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[ken restivo-3]

On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 11:25:13AM +0100, Atte Andr?? Jensen wrote:

> Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
>
> > What does
> >
> >    sndfile-info <filename>
> >
> > say about this file?
>
> Hey, cool command! Seems it was saved from Logic, not protools as I wrote...
>
> atte@vestbjerg:~/music/renoise/projects/lunatunes$ sndfile-info
> audio_31_1.aif
>
> Version : libsndfile-1.0.20
>
> ========================================
> File : audio_31_1.aif
> Length : 24773120
> FORM : 24773112
>   AIFF
>   COMT : 410
>    count  : 1
>     time   : 0x0
>     marker : 0
>     length : 19
>     string :  Creator: Logic Pro
>   COMM : 18
>    Sample Rate : 44100
>    Frames      : 8257536
>    Channels    : 1
>    Sample Size : 24
>    Encoding    : NONE
>   CHAN : 32 (unknown marker)
>   SSND : 24772616
>    Offset     : 0
>    Block Size : 0
>
> ----------------------------------------
> Sample Rate : 44100
> Frames      : 8257536
> Channels    : 1
> Format      : 0x00020003
> Sections    : 1
> Seekable    : TRUE
> Duration    : 00:03:07.246
> Signal Max  : 3.10893e+06 (-8.62 dB)
>

I have had problems with AIFF files from a Mac because of the obnoxious AppleDouble format with resource forks and such. The AIFF file showed up as just raw data, and all the useful information, headers, format info, etc, was lost, because it was stored in a separate invisible file which I did not get.

-ken
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[Erik de Castro Lopo-10]

Atte André Jensen wrote:

> Hey, cool command!

Yep its been part of libsndfile for about 10 years.

> Seems it was saved from Logic, not protools as I wrote...
>
> atte@vestbjerg:~/music/renoise/projects/lunatunes$ sndfile-info
> audio_31_1.aif

There is really nothing unusual about that file, especially nothing
that would cause the symptoms you describe.

Erik
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[Viktor Mastoridis]

I'm having trouble opening a few aiff files,

I don't how competent am I, but what I would personally do is try to convert the files to say, wav:

1. Try soundkonverter (sudo apt-get install soundkonverter): I use daily, great converter from/into most audio formats.

2. Then, there is the Perl Audio Converter who offers even more options (sudo apt-get install pacpl). It's a terminal/perl based app, but offers even greater range of audio formats (and maybe different libraries?).

Finally, open it in audacity? I had a few problem with some audio files in the past, and opening them in Audacity would 'clear' all errors.

Hope this helps

--
Viktor Mastoridis
Music-o-Graph
& Educator
www.MediTera.Co.Uk

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[Brent Busby]

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:

> Atte André Jensen wrote:
>
>> Hey, cool command!
>
> Yep its been part of libsndfile for about 10 years.

This thread has been very helpful for me too.  Several years ago, I
sampled an entire drumset fairly exhaustively at multiple volumes, mic
distances, etc. with an Akai MPC2000 and a pair of Earthworks condenser
mics.  I use the sample set a lot now that I'm living in an apartment,
partially because it's really nice, and partially because the set that
was sampled was the one I used in my band twenty years ago, so it's
fairly nostalgic that I "virtually" still have my drums.  (And partially
because I'd probably be evicted if I tried to bring a drumset in
there...)  Actually it's fairly eerie to listen to in headphones with no
EQ or effects -- if you sequence things a human drummer would do, which
I can do because I'm a drummer, you'd swear it was that drumset.

The MPC2000 saves its samples in its quirky SND format that I haven't
had anything handy to translate into other formats up until now, so I've
always worried about dependence on the Akai hardware samplers.  They're
still popular now, but I've seen plenty of gear become obscure that used
to be common.  Even worse, the Akai filesystem is a bizarre mutation of
DOS/FAT that gets long filename capability from a kludge completely
incompatible with the one Microsoft ended up using in Windows 95 and
later.  The files look like FILENAM~.EXT when mounted as FAT, and you
have no way of finding out what the real names were on the Akai from
looking at the directories in Windows or in Linux.

Today, this thread about sndfile-info made me try (on a lark) running
sndfile-info on one of my Akai SND files, and it floored me -- it knew
everything about the sample.  It saw the original Akai filename embedded
in the file.  It even knew specifically that it came from an Akai
MPC2000.  I tried converting it to a standard WAV with sndfile-convert,
and that worked too.

Later, after looking at the libsndfile web site, I did see that MPC2000
compatibility was added earlier this year, but I didn't expect that when
I tried it, so it did surprise me.  Usually, when something says it has
Akai support, they mean S1000 rack sampler format.  This is very useful.

--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
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[Erik de Castro Lopo-10]

Thanks Brent,

Its the ocassional email like this that makes it all worth while.

Cheers,
Erik

Brent Busby wrote:

> This thread has been very helpful for me too.  Several years ago, I
> sampled an entire drumset fairly exhaustively at multiple volumes, mic
> distances, etc. with an Akai MPC2000 and a pair of Earthworks condenser
> mics.  I use the sample set a lot now that I'm living in an apartment,
> partially because it's really nice, and partially because the set that
> was sampled was the one I used in my band twenty years ago, so it's
> fairly nostalgic that I "virtually" still have my drums.  (And partially
> because I'd probably be evicted if I tried to bring a drumset in
> there...)  Actually it's fairly eerie to listen to in headphones with no
> EQ or effects -- if you sequence things a human drummer would do, which
> I can do because I'm a drummer, you'd swear it was that drumset.
>
> The MPC2000 saves its samples in its quirky SND format that I haven't
> had anything handy to translate into other formats up until now, so I've
> always worried about dependence on the Akai hardware samplers.  They're
> still popular now, but I've seen plenty of gear become obscure that used
> to be common.  Even worse, the Akai filesystem is a bizarre mutation of
> DOS/FAT that gets long filename capability from a kludge completely
> incompatible with the one Microsoft ended up using in Windows 95 and
> later.  The files look like FILENAM~.EXT when mounted as FAT, and you
> have no way of finding out what the real names were on the Akai from
> looking at the directories in Windows or in Linux.
>
> Today, this thread about sndfile-info made me try (on a lark) running
> sndfile-info on one of my Akai SND files, and it floored me -- it knew
> everything about the sample.  It saw the original Akai filename embedded
> in the file.  It even knew specifically that it came from an Akai
> MPC2000.  I tried converting it to a standard WAV with sndfile-convert,
> and that worked too.
>
> Later, after looking at the libsndfile web site, I did see that MPC2000
> compatibility was added earlier this year, but I didn't expect that when
> I tried it, so it did surprise me.  Usually, when something says it has
> Akai support, they mean S1000 rack sampler format.  This is very useful.
>
> --
> + Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
> + UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
> + University of Chicago +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
> + Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
> + James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky

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[Paul Coccoli]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Brent Busby <brent@...> wrote:

> This thread has been very helpful for me too.  Several years ago, I sampled
> an entire drumset fairly exhaustively at multiple volumes, mic distances,
> etc. with an Akai MPC2000 and a pair of Earthworks condenser mics.  I use
> the sample set a lot now that I'm living in an apartment, partially because
> it's really nice, and partially because the set that was sampled was the one
> I used in my band twenty years ago, so it's fairly nostalgic that I
> "virtually" still have my drums.  (And partially because I'd probably be
> evicted if I tried to bring a drumset in there...)  Actually it's fairly
> eerie to listen to in headphones with no EQ or effects -- if you sequence
> things a human drummer would do, which I can do because I'm a drummer, you'd
> swear it was that drumset.

So are you going to release that sample set or what?!
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[Brent Busby]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Paul Coccoli wrote:

> So are you going to release that sample set or what?!

I suppose I could..  It's really nothing anyone couldn't do with some
good mics and a sampler.  Right now it's online at:

  http://www.keycorner.org/pub/midi/mpc/

It's not everything in that directory, just the files that end in
.tar.bz2.  They're about 50MB each.  If you extract those, you end up
with raw disk images that you can 'dd' onto zip disks, which can be read
by an MPC2000 with a SCSI zip drive.  Of course the sndfile-info and
sndfile-convert commands offer the possibility of loopback-mounting them
as FAT, and then renaming each file according to the real long filename
stored in its metadata, too.  After that you could convert to WAV and
use however you like without an Akai.

These files are in this crude format because all they're meant to do is
provide backups for me when zip disks fail.  I haven't done anything to
make them particularly easy to use at this point.  Also, I once had the
Alesis HR16:A and HR16:B drum machine pair, and since those machines
really offer nothing in the way of sound programming besides detuning, I
sampled and sold them a long time ago.  Those were the kind of drum
machines that did not amount to more than the samples in their ROMs.

As for the drums themselves, they're nothing special, other than their
nostalgic value to me.  The main reason I wanted them in the form of a
sample set is because, looking at all the sample libraries that I'd ever
seen, the market was filled with techno drums, studio drums, processed
drums, hiphop drums, even country drums...but no drums drums.  I got
sick of all the processing and special EQ in these sample libraries,
which may or may not actually go with the song you're working on.  It
seemed absurd that nobody ever seemed to simply offer a drumset, miced,
unprocessed, and not EQ'ed, as a sample library.  That kind of sound
treatment is the kind of thing you probably want to do yourself on your
own mixer for the song you happen to be working on.  (And it's quite
useful in an apartment!)

So if you're interested, go ahead and download, and please try to
remember, it's my residential cable connection.  The things in my /pub
directory are offered for whoever may find an interest in the
non-private files I've got laying around anyway.

--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
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[Brent Busby]

Oh, just occured to me that I never explained why I made my cryptic
reference to the Alesis HR16:A and :B drum machines -- those samples are
on the same disk images as the acoustic drumset samples, just because
they were on the same zip disks.

--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
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[Hartmut Noack]

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Hash: SHA1

Brent Busby schrieb:

> ... which may or may not actually go with the song you're working on.  It
> seemed absurd that nobody ever seemed to simply offer a drumset, miced,
> unprocessed, and not EQ'ed, as a sample library.  That kind of sound
> treatment is the kind of thing you probably want to do yourself on your
> own mixer for the song you happen to be working on.

is stuff like this:

http://lapoc.de/samples/drumset01-sep08wallywoods-zettberlin.wav

or that:

http://lapoc.de/samples/

really that rare?

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[Brent Busby]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Hartmut Noack wrote:

> Brent Busby schrieb:
>
>> ... which may or may not actually go with the song you're working on.  It
>> seemed absurd that nobody ever seemed to simply offer a drumset, miced,
>> unprocessed, and not EQ'ed, as a sample library.  That kind of sound
>> treatment is the kind of thing you probably want to do yourself on your
>> own mixer for the song you happen to be working on.
>
> is stuff like this:
>
> http://lapoc.de/samples/drumset01-sep08wallywoods-zettberlin.wav
>
> or that:
>
> http://lapoc.de/samples/
>
> really that rare?

It was to me in 2001 when I did mine...  :)

Like I said, they're available for anyone who wants them, but I just
made them for myself.  By the way...nice drums.

--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
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[david-602]

Brent Busby wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Paul Coccoli wrote:
>
>> So are you going to release that sample set or what?!
>
> I suppose I could..  It's really nothing anyone couldn't do with some
> good mics and a sampler.  Right now it's online at:
>
>   http://www.keycorner.org/pub/midi/mpc/

[snips]

> So if you're interested, go ahead and download, and please try to
> remember, it's my residential cable connection.  The things in my /pub
> directory are offered for whoever may find an interest in the
> non-private files I've got laying around anyway.

Maybe you could put them up on archive.org with a little page about
them? I'm presuming they're under some CC-license ...

--
David
gnome@...
authenticity, honesty, community
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[ken restivo-3]

On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 08:25:51PM -1000, david wrote:

> Brent Busby wrote:
> > On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Paul Coccoli wrote:
> >
> >> So are you going to release that sample set or what?!
> >
> > I suppose I could..  It's really nothing anyone couldn't do with some
> > good mics and a sampler.  Right now it's online at:
> >
> >   http://www.keycorner.org/pub/midi/mpc/
>
> [snips]
>
> > So if you're interested, go ahead and download, and please try to
> > remember, it's my residential cable connection.  The things in my /pub
> > directory are offered for whoever may find an interest in the
> > non-private files I've got laying around anyway.
>
> Maybe you could put them up on archive.org with a little page about
> them? I'm presuming they're under some CC-license ...
>

The real time-consuming task would be making them into a Hydrogen kit or GigaSampler file. But then others could use it, true.

Pretty cool thing that sndfile-info can read MPC. A friend just sold his MPC2000XL Professional, and bought a Mac laptop with Live using the proceeds.

-ken
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[Brent Busby]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, david wrote:

> Maybe you could put them up on archive.org with a little page about
> them? I'm presuming they're under some CC-license ...

Okay, I can do that sometime.  I didn't really know that there would be
some interest though.  I don't mind making them fully redistributable
either, since it always struck me as odd that someone would try to claim
copyright on a bunch of instrument sounds.  After all, they're just drum
samples...

(I think I might be able to see it for the huge Gigasampler format
multisamples of difficult to simulate instruments like saxophone
though...  Something like that has got to be a lot of work for somebody
somewhere.)

--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
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