[linux-audio-user] BR532 multitracker file format / sync

Joe Button linux-audio-user at joebutton.co.uk
Thu Apr 22 09:50:24 EDT 2004


On Thursday 22 April 2004 11:33, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 11:04:40 +0100
> Joe Button <linux-audio-user at joebutton.co.uk> wrote:

> > 1) Probably a long shot, but does anyone have any clue as to how I might
> > convert the files from the BR-532's internal format to WAV or whatever?
...
> > Cursory Googling hasn't revealed a lot about the file formats to me -
> > they're described as 'MT2', 'LV1', and 'LV2' (in decreasing order of
> > sound quality).

> I'm the author of libsndfile. If you can make available a small example
> file (100kbytes or less) I'll be willing to have a look. It might also be
> useful to suply the same file decoded to WAV just for comparison.

If you can reverse-engineer it from the files I'll be extremely grateful and 
impressed, but frankly a bit surprised. What's on the SM cards looks pretty 
opaque. I think this sort of thing is why RMS started the free software 
movement in the first place.

If you're up for having a look, I've recorded a short (a few seconds) jazzy 
noodle onto a virgin card and uploaded the card's contents wholesale to
http://joebutton.co.uk/br532card.tgz. Sorry it's rather bigger than you wanted 
- I just recorded a very short snippet but it turned out to be bigger than 
I'd hoped (578k).

There are three tracks:

Track 1: Me hitting a mug with a teaspoon (the mug's blue and says 'Elvis 
lives' on it if you're interested) - 6.68 seconds

Track 2: Acoustic rhythm guitar - 8.26 seconds

Track 3: Acoustic jazz guitar noodling - 7.85 seconds

Unfortunately the tracks don't show up as separate files on the card data.  
Presumably they're buried in take_dat.br0. I've included the tracks as wavs 
along with the raw card data.

The Windows prog that converts from the BR532 format to wavs is here, if it's 
any help:
http://www.roland.co.uk/SUPPORT/UPDATES/BR532wav.ZIP

If there's anything else you'd like let me know, although I'm going away for a 
week or so today so it'll be a while before I can do much else. Maybe 
Thorsten will be able to help (he seems like a helpful kind of guy).

As I said, if you can figure this stuff out I'll be enormously grateful, but 
if not don't sweat it.

Ta,

Joe x



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