WAV-MAKER-1600 Product Information

Why did we create WAV-MAKER-1600?

The Boss BR-1600CD is Top Sound Production's primary mobile recording platform of choice. Before purchasing our BR-1600CD, we analyzed the market of available digital audio workstations, and the BR-1600CD was the definitive leading platform for mobile use. Some of our reasons for choosing it as our mobile platform were:

Portability due to it's small footprint in size (19" by 13" by 4")
8 track simultaneous record to a 40 GB hard drive
XLR and 1/4" jacks on every input with phantom power
Compression and EQ Effects available on all 8 inputs
A USB port for exporting .WAV files to our computer.

"But wait!" you say. "Your fifth reason for choosing the Boss BR-1600CD is the ability of the BR-1600CD to export to .WAV files. Why would I even need your product?"

BR-1600CD

A picture of Top Sound Production's very own BR-1600CD

To answer that question is to relate our own experience in testing the BR-1600CD in our studio. Once we had recorded an 8-track live performance and we wanted to move the recorded tracks to our PC to use with Cakewalk SONAR 3 Producer for mix down and mastering, we discovered something quite astonishing: The BOSS BR-1600CD export process was slow, time consuming and required human interaction before the process would be completed. The first "phase" of export seemed to be a BR-1600CD internal "playback" which, depending on the number of tracks and length of the material, could take many minutes to hours to complete. After the internal "playback" phase completed, we would have to copy the exported WAV files from a directory on the BR-1600CD to our computer and this process could take many minutes to hours depending on the length of the material.

While we were waiting for this to finish, we read further in the BR-1600CD User's Guide. What we discovered sparked our creative problem-solving mind:

You can back up the entire BR-1600CD in one step, and to the PC the BR-1600CD looks like a hard drive like any other hard drive. Hmmm... the project folders contain a bunch of files related to a single song on the disk.

Then the revelation: Why not figure out a way to copy off the project folder, then convert the contents of that folder to the WAV files we needed?

Veteran software-engineer-by-day (musician-and-engineer/producer-by-night) Gene Cookmeyer disappeared into his cave and emerged sometime later with WAV-MAKER-1600. The results: We repeated the whole export process in about 30 minutes - of which about 29 minutes was the time waiting for a folder copy to complete. We simply performed one folder copy, ran WAV-MAKER-1600 against the folder, and within one minute the conversion was complete. Also of value and equally important, MINIMAL USER INTERACTION was needed.