Tascam DR-05 ticking noises revisited

Is it possible the "ticking" is there even when you *do* have signal, you just don't notice it (lost in the signal)?

Is the ticking at a very regular interval?

Note that a WAV file is made of multiple chunks, headers, data. Look up the full details of the RIFF-WAVE format and see how much *could* be in there. It is possible that Tascam are inserting periodical "other" data into the stream - header, raw data, metadata, raw data, metadata ...

Some software does not fully implement the WAV file format properly, and assumes 44 byte header, then raw data to end of file. It's lazy, and it mostly works. Then sometimes it doesn't.

You could measure the time between ticks in e.g. Cooledit (Audition) or others, by zooming in to the sample level. Or look at the file in a hex editor. You may well find that the interval is a nice round number of samples.

Of course, if Cooledit loads the WAV file correctly, you might never see the ticks to zoom in on them :)

You could try submitting a minimal-sample of the file to Peak LE's developers and see if they see a problem with their file handling?

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Mike Brown: mjb[-at-]signal11.org.uk  |    http://www.signal11.org.uk

It doesn't appear to be, even a small amount of pre-amp hiss is enough to stop it if I turn up the gain with a loading resistor instead of a mic.

No, it seems to be random clusters of ticks, but it only starts a few tens of milliseconds after the last sound.

Peak LE is very old software but the Tascam DR-05 is relatively new, so I suppose it could be implimenting something that wasn't in the original .wav specification.

I can't use Cooledit on a Mac G3, which is my workhorse for professional editing.

I think they have gone out of business.

At least I can get around the problem by using an analogue transfer, but it isn't a good solution. Possibly there is some newer software that will still run on a G3 and can convert .wav to .aiff without the clicks.

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~ Adrian Tuddenham ~ 
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You might try using either sox or Audacity to convert the files, and then load them into Peak L.E.

sox is "Sound Exchange". I know it as a command-line program on Linux, but as long as you have some flavor of OS X, you should be able to run it there. Main page is

; the latest OS X version is at .

Something like

sox input.wav output.aiff

might be a good first attempt; if you don't like the results from that, read the documentation to find a *lot* of switches to adjust what it does (sample rate, number of bits, signed/unsigned, etc.)

Audacity is a GUI program, similar to Cool Edit and others, for editing audio files. It can load a file in one format and then save in another. Main page is

, Mac downloads at . The current Mac version they offer needs OS X 10.7 or later; they also have versions for OS X

10.0 - 10.6, and even OS 9, at .

(If you use Peak L.E. to convert one of the .wav files to .aiff, and then open the .aiff in Audacity, you might even be able to see the transients causing the clicks if you zoom in enough.)

Standard disclaimers apply: I don't get money or other consideration from any projects mentioned.

Matt Roberds

OK

OK. Well that's confused me ;) ...

I think all the little foibles were in the WAV spec from the start. It's just that some software takes the view that a WAV is the simplest version possible, 44 bytes of header, most of which you can ignore: You need number of channels, bit depth, sample rate, length. Everything else in the header, boring, and byte 45 starts the data. This works for all the "plain" wav files that don't have lists of cue points and other data in there, or repeated "and here's another data chunk", "and here's another data chunk" content.

You can probably use it's loose relation, Adobe Audition (probably now Adobe Cloud Edition Audition Pro XL or whatever it is today ...) part of Adobe's reason to buy up Cooledit was to make it multiplatform (Win/Mac).

Ah.

There should be many tools for that job (GUI and command line based) so maybe that is a simpler answer.

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Mike Brown: mjb[-at-]signal11.org.uk  |    http://www.signal11.org.uk

cy-mac/ .

The last AV editing job I did was done with a Griffin Powermate Jog Wheel a nd this package:

which supports Windows, Mac and Linu x. I used it to produce some half hour industrial videos for a local compan y. It was a huge step up from my days of mechanical editing film or magneti c tape. Prior to that, I used some early electronic editors based on VHS, U

-matic and 1" tape, back in the '80s. As always, I copied the digital files to the computer to edit, in case of a major equipment failure. The work wa s done on an I7, eight 3.00 GHz core system with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB HD . Very little learning curve, and excellent quality in the finished product . The business was thrilled with the finished media which was used at trade shows..

This is OS 8.6 only. I'm going to try SoundApp 2.6.1 and see if I can work out how to do conversions with it.

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~ Adrian Tuddenham ~ 
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www.poppyrecords.co.uk

Possibly there was a subtled DC shift due to rectification, second harmonic or actual air pressure, which shifted the quantising level away from the ticking point immediately following the sound and then slowly drifted back during silence. The mic was crossed stereo ribbons and the uncorrected pre-amp response is flat to under 20 c/s - although I had

150 c/s bass roll-off in circuit because the actors were only about 2 ft from the mic (which is 'close' for a ribbon). [...].

I have a feeling that happened after Mac went to OSX, so it won't be any use to me.

There is no GUI command line in OS 8.6, but there should be some very simple conversion programs available for free - as long as they can cope with the more recent .wav files.

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~ Adrian Tuddenham ~ 
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www.poppyrecords.co.uk

I haven't, this is OS 8.6

[..]

I have a very early version of Audacity that claims to run on OS 8.6, but it is not very good in that environment. Much better is SoundApp, which was written specifically for the old Mac platform - but its conversion system is a bit clunky and I remember having to fiddle about with it each time I needed to rediscover how it worked.

Peak actually shows them, but the display is not always a good representation at magnifications approaching bit level on one axis and quantising level on the other.

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~ Adrian Tuddenham ~ 
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www.poppyrecords.co.uk

~~ Update: ~~

I have tried SoundApp and Audion 3, they both give the ticking noises when they are playing the unprocessed .wav files. I'll take the files on the original MicroSD card to a friend who has a more recent computer and see what result that gives.

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~ Adrian Tuddenham ~ 
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www.poppyrecords.co.uk

I think you mean "as long as they were written to correctly deal with the long-standing WAV format".

I'm not aware that someone has added some new trick facilities into .WAV that is confusing to older software. The spec always had multiple data types (chunks) that *could* occur. It rarely did, in normal/boring WAV files.

It's like the bad handling of certain features of the UK DTTV specification, where some companies tested only against "what is being broadcast now", and didn't implement the spec to the letter.

When the NIT table got split into multiple parts, due to larger numbers of channels on the Freeview platform, a lot of equipment broke. Badly. As in don't rescan, or it will brick the device.

A lot of blame was put on the broadcasters "for changing their system", which wasn't fair: They just started using the rest of the spec that was always there. The manufacturers were to blame, for failing to implement the receiver properly. Of course, most of the units were "no longer supported" or the manufacturers had already gone out of business.

Hopefully, if you try other software to load the files, you'll find one written better!

--
--------------------------------------+------------------------------------ 
Mike Brown: mjb[-at-]signal11.org.uk  |    http://www.signal11.org.uk

says...

I bought a PC with a Pentium-100 and DOS 6.22 in 1995 and used it, with some upgrades, as a daily driver until 2008. (Among other things, it ended up with a K6-2 400 and Linux.) Then I built this PC in 2008, with an AMD Athlon 64 x2 3.2 GHz and Linux, and I'm still using it 11 years later.

Having said all that... sometimes ya gotta buy a new computer. :D

Or at least a *newer* computer. If you get a Mac that's new enough for OS X, you instantly get access to a lot of software that was developed for Linux. If it's an older version of OS X, you might not be able to use the very latest version of such software, but you can still use it.

If you don't want to spend very much money, don't mind doing more work, and if you can drive Linux, you can get a Raspberry Pi Zero W for about $5. Install Sox on the Pi. scp the .wav file from the Mac into it, SSH into it, use Sox to convert it to .aiff, scp the .aiff back to the Mac, and work on it in your preferred editor. Or, for a little more setup work, install Netatalk on the Pi, so it will show up as a shared drive on your Mac. Write yourself a shell script that runs on the Pi, watching the shared directory, to automatically convert any .wav files that get dumped there.

Matt Roberds