Transcode Minidisc .aea Files to 32-bit WAV

[Henry Remsen]

Hi folks, anyone have experience transcoding native .aea files from a MiniDisc to 32-bit uncompressed floating point? I was able to upload using a USB-connected Sony MZ-RH1 via QHiMDTransfer for Mac OS, then opened the files in VLC. Successfully saved using Streaming/Transcoding Wizard but I have no idea if all of the raw data was preserved at the highest bit-depth. (The resulting WAV files are 10x the size of the originals.) Does anyone know exactly how VLC handles the data? Much obliged!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Depends how. If you used s32l, yes.

[Henry Remsen]

Jean-Baptiste, Thank you for your reply.

So what is s32l? (A setting in VLC or are you referring to something else?) In VLC I had a choice of 32-bit integer or 32-bit floating point and chose floating point. Specifically:

In VLC 2.0.9 (not the latest) I followed these steps in the Streaming/Transcoding Wizard menu: Audio > Transcode audio > Codec: Uncompressed, floating point > Bitrate: [doesn't matter; output file size unaffected] > Encapsulation format: WAV. The Transcode/save took about 10 seconds to output a 393MB WAV from the original (18 minute long) 41 MB .aea file. Which means it wasn't doing much processing at all, a good thing?

Also, the options in VLC 2.2.4 (latest) are different and I couldn't figure out how to perform the same transcode as with previous version software.

Thanks again!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Last page of transcode wizard gives you the "sout" option that was used. You can use that to recreate it in 2.2.4