Exporting MRS-1608 recordings to .WAV

ben
Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:04:00 +0000

While this isn't exactly the normal sort of NF article, this took me hours to work out.

I have a bunch of gigs recorded on an Zoom MRS-1608 recording desk. Until recently to capture/edit the recordings, I recorded the master-output via a Line-in connector on an iMac (into Soundtrack Pro). This worked fine, but all the levels were set on the desk, and mixed-down to a stereo output, which means to change the levels, you have to capture the song again. And there is no way of adding effects to specific channels and so on..

The solution should have been simple - Zoom have an application called "Audio File Manager", an extremely buggy and broken application that (should) take the recordings via USB, or a CD and convert each track to a .WAV or .AIFF file (which can then be edited in any audio application)

The problem is, when I transfered the backups onto the computer (Mac OS X version 10.4.11 and 10.5), and selected them in the Audio File Manager, it was blank. No projects were listed.

After hours of searching around forums, I found a possible solution - delete the "backup.inf" file from the folder, and it will show up. This did nothing on the Mac version, so I tried it in the Windows version, and it worked! Then the problem was having to burn the backup CD, transfer it to the (aging) Windows PC, export each track individually, then transfer the large WAV files over wifi to the iMac.. It would be far better to convert the backups to WAV on the iMac.

Looking at the Audio File Manager manual for the 10th time, I noticed the screenshot had the projects named "PROJ001", "PROJ002" and so on. So, I decided to try renaming the project folder from "JKELL_1" to "PROJ001", and suddenly it listed the project in the Window, I could select the JKELL_1 project from the list, select the correct channel and export an .AIFF file!

It's because the application expects you to use the USB interface, which connects the MRS-1608 as an external harddrive. On the devices, all the projects are organised like "MRS-USR/PROJ001/TRACK0_0.DAT" and so on. The backups are written like "CD-drive/ANAME/TRACK0_0.DAT", and since the Audio File Manager is so badly written, it completely refuses to see the DAT files..

Basically, if you cannot get the Zoom MRS 1608's Audio File Manager to export a WAV or AIFF, make sure you have a folder called "PROJ001" that contains all the files such as "TRACK0_0.DAT"

Keywords to help people searching find this. Zoom MRS-1608. Audio File Manager. Audio File Manager for MRS Series (Macintosh Mac OS X). Convert DAT to WAV AIFF. Convert TRACK0_0.DAT to WAV.