Interleaving and Splitting with Wave Agent

Sound Devices produces a nice little program called Wave Agent mainly for producing sound report sheets out of metadata generated by their field recorders. But it also has a few other useful little functions… combine these with batch renaming and you have a powerful combination…

You will need:
Wave Agent by Sound Devices.
Batch renaming software. In this example, I use Adobe Bridge.
Some audio files.

For this example, I will demonstrate how Wave Agent and Adobe Bridge can make the file structure that the Zoom H6 uses to record more manageable. This also works great if you choose the wrong setting in an Edirol r44.

Let’s say I recorded 10 takes using 4 inputs, to 4 separate files, and now I want them as 10 4-channel wavs.

Well, we don’t need the .hprj files, and all the .wavs have unique names, so let’s put them all in the same folder.

Search the folder containing all the recordings and their folders for .wav files and pop them into a new folder.

Then, using your batch renaming software of choice (newer versions of OSX have a batch rename function), rename them how you want. The key thing is that they must end with something like ‘_1’, ‘_2’, ‘_3’ and ‘_4’. Wave Agent recognises the underscore and the channel name.

In this case, I just removed all the ‘Tr’s.

Then, open up Wave Agent.

And import your audio.

As you can see, it recognises them as 10 tracks of 4 channels, even though they are actually 40 files. So, click split/combine.

Don’t be worried by the massive table, because Wave Agent has recognised our files as 4 channel audio, it can combine the files automatically. Just set your destination using the ‘…’ button on the right and hit ‘process’.

In no time at all, you’ll have a set of files like this. Use another batch rename to get rid of all the numbers and underscores, and you should have some convenient multichannel audio.

Wave Agent can be used for a few other things as well – you can interleave .wav files from a Pro Tools session working in ‘multiple mono’ mode, separate polywavs, or edit metadata.