Perfect Clarity Audio

farss wrote on 12/10/2004, 12:59 PM
This is probably ho hum stuff for the audio guys but I wonder how many of us video guys know that Vegas cames with the very useful pca codec from Sony.
PCA is a lossless codec that'll compress audio files to around 50% of the original size. That may not be that exciting if all you do is vanilla video stuff but I edit huge amount of audio for my client and I like to keep copies of all the source, this client has a bad habit of loosing masters!
I typically back up the .wav files to DVD-ROM but space is pretty limited and as a typical project is 10 hour s of 16/44.1 that can add up to several DVDs. With pca I can hlave the number of DVDs I need for an archive and hence double my shelf space.
Very handy stuff. Now I'm wondering if there's a hardware device that'll play pca, seems to me with this encoding system I could fit the same amount of audio onto a CD at 24/48 as can be fitted as 16/44.1 cda.
Bob.

Comments

MyST wrote on 12/10/2004, 1:41 PM
I was kinda hoping that since Sony bought Sonic Foundry, we'd start seeing PCA compatible Walkmans and stuff, but so far... :-(

Mario
farss wrote on 12/10/2004, 1:46 PM
I did find that quite a few PC based players will play it, guess that's something!
MJhig wrote on 12/10/2004, 4:33 PM
I do the same type of archiving myself Bob, this is why I would like to see a choice for .pca in the Save As > Copy and trim media dialog rather than defaulting to .wave 64.

I could then simply save directly to data CD/DVD when archiving rather than the far less elegant methods to convert we now have.

I asked for this when the V5 "Wish List" was running on the Audio forum and several others dittoed it but......didn't get it.

MJ
farss wrote on 12/10/2004, 5:27 PM
Sounds like a good idea to me, I tend to have only a few very large audio files, mostly off 2 hour DATs so converting by hand isn't an issue but I can see where on complex rather than large projects it'd be an issue. This should be easy enough to script though, maybe, anyone?