Paul P

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. 

Does it update the SFZ files too?

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.

Just to make sure all of this was going to be useful, I fired up X2 and went straight to the Media Brower and loaded a Jacyn Riffs sample.

Well, Sonar didn't crash but she sounds pretty sick (sick like in dying). But then so do the trumpets and everything else.

The samples sound fine playing in Windows Media Player and sound reasonable in DropZone so there must be something with the Media Browser that I'm not aware of.

I'll look into this more tomorrow evening.

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.

Just did the Session Drummer 3 samples folder found at :

...\Vstplugins\Session Drummer 3\Contents\Kits

There are twelve subfolders and I ran fre:ac on these one at a time. These folders have up to about 800 flac files each. Fre:ac behaved flawlessly.

3874 flac files in all. Took about 10 minutes total. Folder size went from almost 800 MB to 2.6 GB.

Unlike for DimPRo, the SD3 sfz files still point to wav files so they don't have to be changed.

Besides DimPro and SD3, I don't think there are any other flac files in Sonar.

EDIT :
Hmmm, in SD3 not all sfz files play if I switch the sfz associated with a particular drum/cymbal to another one. But this also is true for the original folders/samples.
More research necessary !

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.

i would caution that making all of these changes to cakewalk files may invalidate any technical support you would receive for the products in question.  

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.

sample librarians are a HUGE issue.  the fact that garage band can integrate an awesome librarian AND come stock on a mac is pretty nice.  fwiw the librarian in n-i's battery 4 is pretty killer! :D

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...