Swap Left-Right channels?

[Saint Nick]

Ha! and you thought you knew an easy answer to this one? Read on...

I need to practice Bach's St. Matthew Passion by means of practice CD's I purchased for my voice (bass).

However the publisher made a bit of a mess and on certain songs I need to swap Left and Right channels so I can distinguish the voice of my part (choir one) always on the left channel, where it is mainly except for roughly one third of the songs, when choir one and choir two sing in unison, where the publisher put the bass voice of both choirs on the right channel.

Yep, I've seen and tried the PowerPack "Channel Move" DSP and it's nice but it's lossy.

And, yes... you've guessed it: I want to do it lossless.

What I have is WMA9.1 two pass VBR 192kbps 44KHz files and I simply want to swap Left and Right channels in a lossless way. Perhaps it's just a single bit toggle with a hex editor...

Anyone's 2-cents worth is welcome? (your's also Spoon! :komisch12 :komisch9: )

Regards, Nick



P.s. Spoon: my dMC 11.5 works absolutely fine except it always, always crashes with an application error on exiting the process?. Is this a known problem? (I can live fine with it).
XP-pro AMD Athlon XP, 1GB etc, etc, bla, bla

[xoas]

Re: Swap Left-Right channels?

*I've never had to try this. *
*I have not tried the Channel Move DSP so I'll take your word about the lossy part.*

What I would do is:
convert the files you want to switch to standard wave;
use Audacity or another wave editor to switch the channels;
re-convert the tracks to your original format

Audacity is free and available from: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

*EDIT: I have since tried both switching channels in Audacity and using the Channel Move DSP in dMC on a couple of different files. The results seem to be identical and I do not see any gross evidence in the waveforms suggesting any loss, nor do i detect a difference between the two files (the one with the channels switched with the Move Channels DSP and with the Channels manually switched using Audacity. I will not claim this is conclusive since waveforms do not clearly translate to listening experience and also I will accept that your ears and probably your equipment are more acute to differences than mine might be.

Still, I would suggest that you try comparing these two methods and that if there is a significant difference between the two results, you might want to reconsider how you are applying the Move Channels DSP. I will also caution that I did these trials with wave files. If I get a chance I will see if applying the DSP to WMA 2 pass directly seems to make any difference*

Best wishes,
Bill

[Spoon]

Re: Swap Left-Right channels?

Most encoding (WMA included) do not encode channels indivudially, insteam the channel is blended into a joint stereo encoding, it is not possible to byte swap.