Re: [ARSCLIST] BWF RF64

[Eric Jacobs <EricJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John,

Thank you for that excellent Grammy reference (dated
May 27th, 2003).

The precise wording can be found at the bottom of page 6:

http://www.grammy.com/PDFs/Recording_Academy/Producers_And_Engineers/Deliver
yRecs.pdf

and reads:

   "2 It is unclear at this time whether the specification of
   the Broadcast Wave File format can be amended to explicitly
   include multi-channel (for numbers of channels > 2) files
   in time for release of this document. Also, BWF files with
   more channels are more likely to exceed the FAT32 maximum
   file size of 2gbytes. When the BWF Standard is so amended
   it is understood that this document will be updated to
   include multichannel content in BWF files."


Although this document is over 4 years old and was written
when MBWF (RF64) was still in the specification stage, now
that MBWF is well defined and even supported by a few vendors
(most notably Steinberg with Nuendo, Cubase and Wavelab), I
still have to agree with John and the folks at the Grammy
Foundation that it is still too soon to support MBWF as an
archival format.  My own recent experiments bear out what
others have noted in this thread: MBWF support and
compatibility are still poor among vendors.

Practically speaking, MBWF is a great intermediate solution
for production work with large files, but it's not supported
widely enough to be used as an archival format.


Eric Jacobs

The Audio Archive, Inc.
tel: 408.221.2128
fax: 408.549.9867
mailto:EricJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx]On Behalf Of John Spencer
Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 8:33 AM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] BWF RF64


I can say from the NARAS P&E Wing Deliverables Committee's
perspective, the next revision of the document will note the progress
made with multichannel BWF implementation, but it will NOT be a
recommended archival format.

Until we can clearly see it in the field, supported by all platforms,
then a change in wording will be considered.

Again, the document can be found here:
http://www.grammy.com/Recording_Academy/Producers_And_Engineers/
Guidelines/

John Spencer

jspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxx

On Sep 4, 2007, at 10:51 PM, Parker Dinkins wrote:

> on 9/4/07 9:28 PM US/Central, Konrad Strauss at
> konrad.strauss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> wrote:
>
>> When we did our tests, about a year ago, RF64 was supported only
>> by Wavelab,
>> Cubase, Nuendo, and Pro Tools would not recognize the file as
>> audio. We did
>> not test Adobe Audition and Soundforge. This may have changed
>> since then.
>
> While it's quite true that not all applications today support
> broadcast wave
> files greater than 4GB, I would suggest that the above list is not
> complete,
> and some of the limitations today may even be imposed by the operating
> system itself.
>
> It's pretty clear to me that this limitation will be history very
> soon, so
> if your application can handle it, then it makes no sense to force
> edits on
> future generations. IMHO, of course.
>
> If you have to distribute files today for 100% compatibility, then
> certainly
> it makes sense to find out what the limitations of the particular
> client are
> today - but if I'm not mistaken, SADiE, Sequoia, and Pyramix can
> handle BWF
>> 4GB now.
>
> With multichannel sound becoming more common place, the 4GB barrier
> can't be
> defended much longer.  See http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?
> elib=13092
> and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF64
>
> --
> Parker Dinkins
> MasterDigital Corporation
> Audio Restoration + CD Mastering
> http://masterdigital.com
>