WaveConvert Pro 2.3 and BarbaBatch 2.1

WaveConvert Pro 2.3 and BarbaBatch 2.1

Introduction Audio File Input and Processing Sample Rate Conversion and Compression Dynamics, Bit-Rate Conversion, and Extensibility File Output Performance -- How Does It Sound? Picking A Winner

While BarbaBatch supports a wider range of sample rates, both applications cover most of the important ones. To complement its sample rate conversion capabilities, WaveConvert Pro also offers eleven brightness settings: four for Real Audio, four for Shockwave audio, a "hard" setting for more intelligible speech, a "soft" setting for music, and the new speech De-esser. (De-essers do just that -- they remove extra "esses" from speech). The "hard" and "soft" brightness settings work very well, adding back high end and presence into files converted to lower sample rates, while not making the files too harsh or brittle.

The RealAudio and Shockwave audio settings produce much better results than if you do a straight conversion using the tools supplied with either of those codecs, and also surpass the quality of BarbaBatch's RealAudio output files. While WaveConvert Pro can't save out these file formats, both Real Networks and Macromedia supply their own simple batch-processing tools for this purpose.

Both programs can generate files in the most common audio compression format, 4-bit ADPCM (Adaptive Pulse Code Modulation). WaveConvert Pro outputs both Microsoft and International Multimedia Association (IMA) ADPCM. Though BarbaBatch inputs and outputs only the Microsoft flavor of ADPCM, it also supports AIFC files (the Macromedia Director format).

In addition to standard ADPCM encoders, WaveConvert Pro offers its own ADPCM compressors for both Microsoft and IMA compression. Both compressors offer definite improvements over the standard versions when played back within WaveConvert Pro, but results can vary when the files are played back using other implementations of ADPCM decompression. The Waves NoLoss encoder utilizes Waves' own lossless compression format specifically designed for audio files. NoLoss is useful for archiving or transferring files, but I didn't review it specifically.