Broadcast WAV

[Larry Kriz]

Curious about something. I have a general understanding about broadcast WAV. Don't think I've ever used it for anything. Or, at least I'm not aware of it being used for anything I've ever recorded here... ever. In other DAW's I've used I don't recall this option being on by default.

I noticed a particular project settings option BWF, which is enabled by default in Reaper. Turning this off does what exactly? Leaving it on does what exactly? Embeds some metadata in with the WAV file?

Is there any advantage or disadvantage to turning it on or off?

Cheers and thanks!

Oh! PS - I'm aware that some streaming services expect you to upload a WAV file (as opposed to an MP3 or whatever). Is that where BWF comes into play? The ability to extract some metadata from the WAV file? Radio? etc

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by Larry Kriz

Leaving it on does what exactly? Embeds some metadata in with the WAV file?

At minimum it embeds the project name/location in the WAV file per the option in render settings. Pretty handy if you need to know where some render came from. It may also store the original timeline position if a track. Maybe other stuff I'm not aware of.

[DVDdoug]

Wikipedia

The purpose of this file format is the addition of metadata to facilitate the seamless exchange of sound data between different computer platforms and applications...


...and supports timecode to enable synchronization with other recordings.


...Since the only difference between a BWF and a "normal" WAV is the extended information in the file header


...Unfortunately, this compatibility also preserves the filesize limitation that WAV files have (4 GB of audio data per data chunk). In order to be able to store audio which would exceed this limit, 2 different chunks exist allowing the audio material to be spread across several files: cont & link (see list above)


Since there is no official naming convention for these subsequent files, and it is still desirable to see at a glance which ones belong to a continuous piece of audio, a lot of programs apply a numbering scheme to the file suffix: .wav, .w01, .w02, ..., .wNN.


...As an extension, RF64 is a BWF-compatible multichannel file format enabling file sizes to exceed 4 GB that has been specified in 2006.

[Larry Kriz]

I think I'll just disable it for now. 20+ years of working with desktop recording systems. Thousands of projects... no one's ever asked about it. It never factored into anything I've done here.

I'm sure there's some level of the entertainment business where BW is vitally important. That's not me lol

If it's not slowing anything down, or adding unnecessary girth to the size of the files, then I wouldn't care one way or another I guess.

I would, however, like to see Cockos add some additional metadata/tag features to MP3... at very least artist name, song title, album title, things like that. The absence of that feature set bothers me to no end.

[karbomusic]

Here's the reason I keep it on... Here's the chunk from a test WAV file...

BWF chunk:
Description: RPP:H:\randomproject\randomproject.rpp
Originator: REAPER
Date: 2020-01-24
Time: 12-37-56
Start offset: 1:21.230

From time time I'll render something, run across it at a later date and not remember the project name where it came from, I can just drag into reaper and the BWF Chunk (under source properties) will contain the RPP project it belongs to.

The second reason is I've had issues in the past where I had various tracks in a project, at various positions - and something happened with the project etc. - with the BWF chuck, which saves the timeline start offset - I can just drag all the WAV files into a blank project > Item > move to original source position and they are all aligned.

I don't see much reason to turn it off honestly as we're only talking about a few hundreds bytes of extra space in the file.

[Larry Kriz]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

I don't see much reason to turn it off honestly as we're only talking about a few hundreds bytes of extra space in the file.

That's an excellent response thanks karbo. ok I'll leave it on lol.

[cyrano]

Also, WAV is limited to 4 GB per file. BWAV is not. Doesn't matter if all you ever do is a 10 minute song in 44.1/34 bit stereo. If you record 8 channels @ 96 kHz for hours, it's unavoidable.