Converting Dimension Pro and SD3 multisamples from flac to wav

Paul P

DimPro samples are flac files and its sfz files point to flac files.

Strange!  My DimPro multisamples are all WAV files (with SFZ files pointing to WAV).  No Flac files whatsoever amongst them, even in the later updates.

Paul P

From your signature, your running Sonar 7 ?

That surely has something to do with it. I'm on X2.

True that my original copy is older, but my installation includes later updates too.

I make a habit of reading all the posts about DimPro in this forum and I have never seen any mention of the multisample file format being changed.  This seems like a major overhaul.  How did I miss that?

Paul P

Kev999, do you have DimPro 1.5 ?

In my case, some of the flac samples are probably from Cakewalk's DimPro free sample packs 1-3.

No, I'm sticking with 1.2 for now.

I have the 3 expansion free packs (which are all WAV), plus a few additional purchased packs from the Cakewalk Store (again all WAV).  I've also created a few of my own multisamples and sfz files.  I therefore need to leave the sample content's folder structure intact and would never want to reinstall it all again from scratch.  I keep it on a separate harddrive (along with content for other softsyths such as Battery3 and SampleTank) and have a backup copy elsewhere.  Whenever I have reinstalled these softsynths or migrated PCs, my 85GB of sample content remains unaffected.

swamptooth, I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to convert the flac files to wav.

I did that easily with the open source fre:ac audio converter. It'll batch convert an entire folder.

I still have to find a way to do it recursively. I've used a recursive grep to change the file types in the sfz files.

You know, since the flac files are compressed, they have to be decompressed everytime a sample is loaded.
That must slow things down.

You'd think that when Cakewalk decided to switch to flac files for its samples, they'd have patched the X2 Media Browser to be able to read them.
They did after all patch DimPro and SD3.

So another reason to convert everything to wav.

I've started the process and have so far done DimPro's drum samples. It's pretty quick with fre:ac, just browse to a folder and hit convert
and it converts all files in the folder.

But there are a lot of folders ! It'll take me a couple of weeks or so, doing an hour or two here and there.

The wav files are roughly three times bigger than the flac files.

Kev999, you have to do fix the sfz files separately, but that's pretty easy with grepWin which will recursively replace a text string within a file with another string.

You just tell it to replace all occurences of ".flac" with ".wav"

I made great progress this evening since, after an awful lot of needless mouse clicking (hours), I discovered by accident that fre:ac will on its own descend recursively into sub folders.

So you can convert 2000 flacs to wavs in about 10 seconds.

fre:ac crashed on me a couple of times when I asked it to do over 1500 files at once, then I had to go and find out where it stopped and continue from there, but for more reasonable numbers of files it works fine.

You're better off doing the main subfolders one at a time since some of them are already all wav files and fre:ac will reconvert them and you end up with a bunch of xxx.wav.new files that have then to be deleted.

I just finished the audio files conversions of the "Multisamples" folder under Dimension Pro. I still have to take care of the sfz files.

Oh, and so far I've ended up with both wav and flac files in the same folder. I will be deleting all flac files as a separate step.

For those of you who might consider doing a similar conversion, I strongly suggest you make a copy of the Multisamples directory and work on that. Once it's done you can switch it with the original and maybe keep that somewhere safe. Also copy a piece of the directory tree and practice on that with fre:ac and grepWin (or whatever other tools you use) until you're satisfied with the procedure.

The options for fre:ac are a bit obscure. One especially important one is the "Use input file folder if possible". This must absolutely be checked and then the Output folder" will be ignored.

I think I'm done, except that I haven't switched the converted Multisamples folder with the original.
It's now 10 Gb big instead of 6 Gb with flac files. A bit odd since a wav file is three times the size of the flac file.
I removed the flac files.

I just did the sfz files, that was easy. Just point grepWin to the Multisamples folder and let it loose.

In a minute or so it converted close to 600 sfz files replacing over 55,000 filename extensions. There are over 31,000 files in the samples folder.

All in all the entire conversion was relatively painless. It wouldn't be more than an hour or two's work if I had to do it over again.

I'm going to convert the Session Drummer 3 samples tomorrow.

Jacyn has come back from the dead, the problem was in the Media Browser. It was set to play samples back at the project tempo.

I figured out what's happening with SD3's samples.

If a sfz file has no references to particular keys (key=, lokey=,hikey=), the sample will play on any instrument in the drum kit.

If there are references to keys in the sfz file, the sample will only play if the key (midi percussion instrument code) is appropriate to the instrument you loaded it for. There are some non-standard codes used in SD3.

So a hats sfz will not play on the floor tom.

All the various hats sfz files will play on the hi-hats, but nowhere else.

That's a reasonable warning. In my case I have copies of the original folders.

I somehow don't expect to be needing Cakewalk support for anything, especially related to samples,
but no one should go mucking around Sonar files without a good idea of what they're doing and a way of backing out of any trouble.
As a last resort one can always reinstall Sonar.

I see what I'm doing as cleaning up a bit of a mess. The fact that the Media Browser will hang sonar on just about any Dim Pro sample
is the most glaring.

I bought Sonar exclusively for it's synths and the recording and mixing environment that goes with them,
so something like the media browser is like one of the most important tools for me, at least in the beginning.
I'd really like a good sample librarian and some sort of consistency between instruments.

I've also had a good time finding out how Sonar is built (I see Sonar as more or less a single instrument).
I expect this to help me greatly when I start to really put it to work.

This saga continues with a new development...

After reading everything I've been able to collect about the sfz file format, which is considerable and has taken me weeks to digest, I thought I'd finally get my hands dirty and actually do something.  I immediately hit a snag, my DimPro samples no longer sustained !  It took me a while to figure things out, especially since I've been off the grid for the last week and have only been able to test some ideas in the last hour or two, now that I'm back on the 'net.  Suffice it to say that I tore my hair out several times in the last few days.

The problem turned out to be that during my conversions from flac to wav, using the fre:ac converter, the loop information did not transfer into the wav files.  This information is stored in the metadata portion of the flac file.  The flac encoder/decoder has an option "keep foreign metadata" but fre:ac does not let one select this option as far as I can tell, and doesn't itself select it.

After further research, I've discovered that the FLAC Frontend (v2.0), which uses flac 1.3 released last month, is sufficient for the task as it has on option to keep the metadata and it will also recursively descend into a folder tree.

I've just tried this out on DimPro's "03 - Organs" subfolder (again fixing the .sfz files to point to the new wav files) and it works !  My samples sustain once more.  I will definitely sleep better tonight !  Tomorrow I'll reconvert all my flac samples, and hope for the best...