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Skylark

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  1. Hello Ben, thanks for the reply. Merging channels would not be optimal. While transcribing, the person listening to the audio regularly has to isolate one channel or another. The channels are each one microphone, so in a large room, on mic might be closer to one of the people speaking, and another mic closer to another person. If, to understand what each person is saying, the person listening to the audio needs to mute all channels but one, but in the conversion process that channel got merged with another channel of a mic a few feet away which is causing an echo, they won't be able to hear the person talking very well. And in our line of work, we can't afford to mis-transcribe a single word, if at all possible... Thank you for being open to adding DCT as an output format. Note that we are still evaluating multiple alternative workflows, but having the option in Switch would definitely be useful.
  2. Hello, We used to do multichannel recordings (up to 8 mics) using an 8 channel USB sound card and MSRS, to DCT format. Then these recordings would get transcribed using ExpressScribe. Recently, we have found a way to record without having to drag around a PC and a large multichannel sound card, using a standalone recorder such as the Zoom F8n https://www.zoom-na.com/products/field-video-recording/field-recording/zoom-f8n-multitrack-field-recorder The problem is that this device records to multichannel WAV files. These files can be very large, much larger for the same recording time than the DCT files were using our previous method. Since what we record is voice, not music, we have been getting by fine with 22.050kHz sampling rate. And in MSRS, the codec selected is GSM 6.10. I have checked the format and sample rate options in the Zoom device, and it only supports 44.1kHz minimum (it cannot go as low as 22.050kHz, but goes up to 192kHz) and PCM format (which is uncompressed). From what I can read on NCH's site, it looks like GSM is about 10x smaller than PCM for the same duration and similar sample rate... (https://www.nch.com.au/acm/index.html) We want to keep using single, multichannel sound files, because (as far as I know) ExpressScribe cannot play back multiple files simultaneously. So we could not, for example, convert a 4-channel WAV file to two stereo MP3 files (which would be much smaller) because we need to be able to listen to all four channels simultaneously to be able to transcribe efficiently. I was wondering: Is there a way to convert multichannel WAV files to multichannel DCT files? The Switch Sound Converter does not seem to support DCT as an output format. Otherwise, can someone make a suggestion as to another format which would work for multichannel recordings and would have smaller file size (for similar quality)? If we convert the WAV files from the Zoom device to that format after recording, that could work (even though it's an extra step, it would make the files much easier to transfer and to archive on DVDs). As a side-note, the NCH site lists the DCT format under "open file formats" (https://www.nch.com.au/acm/formats.html) -- does anyone know where I could find a specification for the format? If there is no available specification, I don't think the "open file format" description is accurate... But if there is, being a programmer, I could possibly make a converter myself if nothing else already exists. If there's nothing we can do along those lines, I think we'll have to stop using the Zoom device, since it seems to be geared towards high-quality music recoding rather than the lower-fidelity recordings we want to do with it. Which is a shame, because its form factor is really convenient compared to a PC and an external USB sound card. Thanks in advance.
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