Logic AIF Masters that Windows Can't Read

[plowman]

When I off-line bounce on Logic at 48K, 24 bit to an AIF file, that file appears in Finder with an icon that says "AIFF," with two green eighth notes (similar to the iTunes icon).

When I perform a digital mixdown with the same settings, the resulting file is a different icon -- a representation of two wave forms, red and blue, that look like a kick drum.

I couldn't care less about what the icons look like. And "get info" in Mac reports both files as AIFF files.

But the second variety -- the ones I get after a digital mixdown -- read in Windows only as a "file." They can't be opened, or at least I haven't yet figured out how to open them. In Properties, the MB reading is correct, but there's no acknowledgement what kind of file it is.

The simple workaround is to bounce everything and leave digital mixdown alone. But there has to be a reason for the above. Thanks in advance for the education.

[Dietz]

Isn't it enough to add the ".aif"-extension to make it work?

[plowman]

Mighty Dietz, who can see the forest AND the trees.

Okay.... You have solved this problem with numbing ease. Thanks. I will now add to my Logic files ".aif", even if OSX already recognizes them as such. The tip-off is the icon.

[Edit] I've since realized that one of the issues is the duplication process within Logic. It adds "dup" at the end of the file, so one may have a file name like "song.aif dup." OSX still recognizes this as an aif file, but Windows doesn't.

Also, when renaming audio files, I've sometimes nixed the extension for the sake of more characters. In Mac, I could get away with this. But it seems to be inviting trouble in cross-platform situations.

[Dietz]

Plowman - glad that I could help you ... and I fail seeing the forest due to all the trees pretty often, BTW [;)] ...

Thing is that I switch between PC and Mac all the time, or work on both platforms simultaneously, so I run in problems like yours (and much more finicky ones) so often that its not funny anymore ...

AFAIK you can get away with the extension-thing on the PC-side when you choose "Show all files" (or: *.* ... which means: Any file-name, with any extension) in the file-dialogue of your PC-application. Just select the - now visible - audio-file manually; in many cases this will do the trick, if it is a valid format in the first place.

All the best,

[rawmusic]

I learned the hard way that PCs and Macs do often speak totally different languages. I had wrongly assumed that a pro product like Adobe Audition on the PC would read sound-designer 2 files, being a pro standard. I happily mixed an entire album and extra edits to SDII and brought them home to do a little processing in audition. How wrong. So, a 30 minute round trip back to my studio, more time than I wanted to spend re-mastering or converting (I forget which I did) and then back home again.

The only format I would be totally confident of using on both platforms is .wav. I wonder if anyone reading this can explain why things can be so different when the audio information contained in the files is obviously the same. I think there is more info stored in a SDII file, but I don't really know.

[Dietz]

@rawmusic said:

[...] I think there is more info stored in a SDII file, but I don't really know.

Actually less.

To dumb down the problem a bit: It needs an additional "hidden" file-description from the Mac-OS to be fully functional.

[jamriding]

Well, is there any way of "unhiding" the file description so that the Mac OS can read it?

[Dietz]

Yes - just convert it to a more "intelligent" format - Broadcast-WAV would be my first choice. It can contain about all of the contained information in an SD2, like time-stamps, markers and so on.

[Edited to insert the missing word "information" [8-)]]

[jamriding]

Thanks for that: very helpful.