Houdini (mainly used on linux) can actually do 3D spatial audio recording with real microphones / speakers in the scene, but it’s features to get audio out of the program are lacking … the .wav export’s in 8-bit.
Houdini’s native binary channel format (bchan) works perfectly to import and export sound, with 32-bit import and export.
So, to get my 3D audio out of Houdini I’ve been converting the .bchan files using adobe audition’s raw input and exporting to .wav but now I’m switching to linux and would love to not have to go back to win-crap every time I want to convert the audio file.
Also, Audio import in Houdini is limited to 44100 16-bit, so here again .bchan would be great if Ardour could export a 44100 32-bit .bchan.
I believe it’s probably the exact same bit’s of data as a 32-bit floating point .wav file with a different header info, since importing as raw data in audition works fine with the default settings.
i’m no expert in this area, but wouldn’t it be better to put this functionality into an external library (eg libsndfile etc) so all linux apps can make use of it? from my limited understanding of what you want it seems that we just need open/save support of the bchan format rather than trying to make specific import/export routines.
o I see, so if I’m gathering correctly Ardour just takes in whatever linux says is a sound file and accociates the correct codec with it. Sorry for looking at things in such a windows way, thats why I’m switching OS’s … that’s a much better way to do it.
Is that something the end user would do? Any tips on how I could go about doing that? I’m almost positive it’s the exact same format as a 44100 khz, 32-bit floating point wav file.
since it is probably not all too common a format, perhaps you could save identical .bchan and .wav files of something simple (like a 1k sine wave perhaps) and attach them for someone to have a look at? i wouldn’t have a clue as to how to go about working with this kind of thing, but maybe someone else here could. another place to ask would be the linux audio developers mailing list (in fact you probably would get better responses there, since this forum is obviously focused on ardour specifically).