User Manual

Table Of Contents
WAVELAB
Editing in the Wave window 6 – 115
The “$$$” file type is WaveLab’s own temporary file format. In case you ex-
perience a computer crash you may restore some of your work by opening
any stray “$$$” files on your hard disk(s).
About 20-, 24- and 32-bit float files
You do not need a 20- or 24-bit audio card to take advantage of the fact
that WaveLab can handle 20- and 24-bit audio files. Any processing or
editing performed on the files is always done at full resolution, even if your
card doesn’t support the full resolution. For playback, WaveLab automat-
ically adapts to whatever card you have installed.
About temporary files
As you work in WaveLab, temporary files used for Undo, etc. are created
on your hard disk, see “Temporary files” on page 28.
You can decide whether these files should be in 16-, 24- or 32 bit format.
This is done on the Preferences–File tab.
The higher this value, the better the quality of the temporary file. However,
32-bit files are also twice as big as 16-bit files and take longer to process.
Text/Excel (.txt) This is a text representation of a waveform. By saving an audio file as a
text file and then opening it in a spreadsheet application such as Excel,
you can view it in textual, decimal form and edit the sample values. When
you open a text file representing a waveform in WaveLab, it will be de-
coded and opened as an audio file. Note that these files are not com-
pressed in any way, so they can get very large! Therefore, avoid creating
and opening extremely large .txt files. Also note that when using 32 bit
float files, the .txt format is not 100% lossless – i.e. information may be
lost! This is because it is not possible to express a binary floating point
value in textual decimal form without some precision loss.
Windows Media
Audio (.wma, .asf))
Microsoft’s own compressed format. WaveLab lets you import/export
audio in this format. Note that it is also possible to import/export audio in
WMA surround format, provided that you have Windows Media Player 9
(or later) installed on your system.
Ensoniq Paris (.paf) Used by the Ensoniq Paris™ system (16 bit resolution).
Raw PCM files
(.raw, .bin, .pcm,
.$$$)
In this format, no information about bit resolution or sample rate is in-
cluded. If you open a file in this format, WaveLab will ask you to specify
the bit resolution and sample rate. If you don’t do this correctly, the file
will not play back as intended.
Format Description