Home » The PARIS Forums » PARIS: Main » PARIS utility script for REAPER - "PARIS Broadcast WAV Prep"
| PARIS utility script for REAPER - "PARIS Broadcast WAV Prep" [message #104228] |
Thu, 15 October 2009 00:43  |
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Hi all. A great conversation with Don Nafe last week got me thinking about how Reaper's scripting capabilities might be used to solve an old, old PARIS problem.
Ever received a folder of WAVs from a client, say that were recorded in ProTools and NOT rendered out from zero? Broadcast WAVs that started wherever they'd been punched in, and whose header info could have been very useful if PARIS could read it - but the header info instead had to be StripWav'd out, and the files manually spotted on the PARIS timeline, praying you got the timings right.
It occurred to me that Reaper's scripting abilities might provide a pretty neat way around that. The attached Reaper script is a series of actions that uses Reaper as a PARIS track prep utility. It takes a folder full of timestamped WAVs, imports them onto separate Reaper tracks, spots them into their correct location via the timestamp in their header and then renders them back out from zero as header-stripped WAVs ready for import into PARIS.
It's a beta, and I am not responsible if your house bursts into flames or your hard drive dies or your truck won't start etc etc. I'm looking for ways to improve and refine it, so feel free to use and modify it (it's easy, just go into "Actions" and edit it) and be sure to give feedback on it. I'd ask only that if you do modify and improve it, you contribute your improvements back to the PARIS community.
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To use the attached script, you have to install it into Reaper first:
Download the script, open Reaper, and go to your "Actions" menu. Open the "Actions" dialogue, find "Import/Export Actions", navigate to the script in the resulting file selector and import it. It should now show up as a menu entry at the bottom of your "Actions" menu, ready for use.
You might also want to go into your Reaper Preferences > Audio > Recording, find "Include in filename for new recordings" and uncheck "Track Index" and "Time Stamp". If you don't do that the filenames grow to an unnecessary length.
Make sure that all the WAV files you want to convert are in one folder (eg no subfolders).
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OK - ready to start. Call up the script from Reaper's "Actions" menu.
1) The script will create a new project and set its timeline and transport to SMPTE time.
2) The script will now open the project's Project Settings dialogue; this is where you'll enter your desired destination formats (ie 16 or 24 bit / 44 or 48 k / WAV / whatever framerate you're using / *no* BWF (.bext) chunk (this is an important setting - unchecking this box makes Reaper automatically strip the headers for you, a la StripWav, for PARIS compatibility). You'll normally want to use the same settings the files arrived as, but if you'll need to do any sort of file conversion as well, this is the time to do it. After you've checked and finalized your settings, click "OK" and you'll be prompted to save your song.
[Note: step 2 is worth examining to see if it's redundant, eg if it can be better addressed in step 4).]
3) You'll now get an Insert Media dialogue; navigate to the folder containing the files you want to import, select them all, click "Open", and when it asks you if you want to "Import Files on separate tracks" - click "Yes".
4) Once you've done that, the script imports the WAV files, each to a separate track, spots them to the timestamp location in their headers and gives you a Consolidate Tracks dialogue where you can finalize your settings and select/create a destination folder for the resulting tracks. Make certain that you uncheck "Ignore Silence Shorter Than..." since you want your files rendered with that invaluable silence that's keeping them in their properly spotted location!
5) Clicking Process renders all tracks, each containing a single correctly spotted file, out from "zero" as a header-stripped WAV suitable for immediate import into PARIS.
All that remains is to quit Reaper, open PARIS, and go to work on your presumably-perfectly-spotted tracks.
This process took far longer to write out than it takes to execute; it should only take a couple of minutes to run through depending on how much audio you have to import.
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How would I like to see this script improved?
- the names of the rendered files contain "consolidated" - I want to figure out how to get rid of that.
- I'd like to make more of these settings automatic (I suspect we'd need to use the Reaper SDK to code an extension - all the hooks to do this appear to be in there, but I know bupkis about coding).
- the script isn't yet smart enough to tell when, say, three guitar punches belong to the same guitar track - right now the three punches will be exported as three separate tracks and you'll have to overlap them yourself.
- if you're working with film cues (I was) you're going to generate some pretty large files if all your stems start an hour into the film. Haven't figured out a way to solve this yet that doesn't involve learning to write code.
Still, that's better than what we had before, and it will get the job done for the moment - sort of an "OMF Import Lite" that bypasses OMF.
"... being bitter is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other guy to die..." - anon
[Updated on: Thu, 15 October 2009 02:25] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: PARIS utility script for REAPER - "PARIS Broadcast WAV Prep" [message #104234 is a reply to message #104232] |
Thu, 15 October 2009 13:51  |
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I don't know - I seem to recall that PAFs can be re-spotted to their originally recorded location within the PPJ they were originally recorded in, which makes me pretty certain their timestamp info is contained in the PPJ they were recorded in but not in the PAF itself.
To turn a PAF into a timestamped WAV I'd suspect what would be needed is to look into the PPJ it came out of, pull the timestamp of the particular file out, turn the PAF into a BWF and then insert that timestamp info in its header. Which is an intriguing thought - once again, a sort of 'poor man's OMF alternative" - but for that, we'd need to be able to decipher the PPJ file format.
Of course as it is right now, you could render the tracks out of PARIS from zero and use Reaper to do the rest of the export prep. Since Reaper now reads PAF directly, you could turn them into much less bulky timestamped segments by importing them into Reaper, using "strip silence" to remove any silence at the beginning of the track, re-rendering them in place as new BWF (which will timestamp the segments) and then running "clean project folder" to delete the original PAFs. There's probably even a way to make Reaper bundle any .L and .R files together, so that the rendering process obligingly turns those into interleaved stereo files too.
That'd leave you with a folder full of timestamped BWF WAVs ready for export and spotting in PT or Nuendo.
Hmmmmm... does this sound like the next candidate for a Reaper script project to you? 
I tell you, this thing's a Swiss Army knife.
"... being bitter is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other guy to die..." - anon
[Updated on: Fri, 16 October 2009 10:32] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: PARIS utility script for REAPER - "PARIS Broadcast WAV Prep" [message #105017 is a reply to message #104234] |
Thu, 11 March 2010 22:55 |
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Dimitrios, I don't know if you've been following the developments with AATranslator ($59), but as of last month it supports the import of PARIS OMFs and their conversion to a range of session formats, including ones readable by Cubase/Nuendo. My script provides a way to get things into PARIS, and now AATranslator gives us a way to get them out.
Workflow:
1) Export your session from PARIS as an OMF.
2) Boot AATranslator and select "OMF" file type in the import tab; navigate to your OMF.
3) Set your options and convert your OMF to the format you want (for Cubase or Nuendo, choose Steinberg Track Archive; Nuendo can also use that or AES31 ADL).
It's that easy. I've been using it regularly for a month now and it's been nothing short of perfect in its translations.
"... being bitter is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other guy to die..." - anon
[Updated on: Thu, 11 March 2010 22:58] Report message to a moderator |
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