Home → Frequently Asked Questions → Wave Editor → What are the changes in the Wave Editor file format for version 1.4?
3.1. What are the changes in the Wave Editor file format for version 1.4?
The Wave Editor file format had some fundamental changes for version 1.4.
Part of the issues with speed we were having with versions previous to 1.4 had to do with the wavetables - the blocks of memory that have a low-resolution description of the waveform so it can be drawn quickly. In versions previous to 1.4, the wavetable was owned by an audio channel, and represented the waveform across all SmartEdits from the start to the end of the audio. When a SmartEdit or the content in the audio channel changed in some way, the waveform had to be re-calculated (analyzed). We utilized some pretty good tricks to only analyze the parts of the audio that were necessary and make it faster, but in some cases it wasn't quite enough - the analyze process could really slow down the editing process and make it unusable when large portions of a file were changed at a time.
We re-thought the idea of wavetables for version 1.4, and decided to make them individually owned by SmartEdits themselves. This way, when a change happened to a particular SmartEdit, it would know how to handle it's own wavetable and analyze only what was necessary. Also, you could move around a SmartEdit completely and not have to re-analyze at all - using the old way, the entire area covered by the SmartEdit would have been re-analyzed. There are some subtle visual drawbacks to this technique, but they are small in comparison to the speed gains.
Thus, in order to save this new technique to the .wedt files (the only file format that retains the information about SmartEdits), we needed to re-configure the method by which the wavetables are stored - each SmartEdit holds the wavetable describing the audio it is referencing from its source.
When Wave Editor 1.4 opens a file saved in "Wave Editor 1.2 format", it has to re-analyze it completely once more in order to assign the new wavetables to their proper SmartEdit. Once saved in .wedt 1.4 format, this will not need to happen again - the wavetables are already assigned, within the file, to the SmartEdit.
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Another change that was made to the .wedt file was the technique by which the audio files are saved in the file. The .wedt file is technically a package (a folder) that contains many smaller files. This is optimal for multichannel files, as each audio channel can get it's own file to read from - no interleaving necessary (de-interleaving can slow down the process of reading a portion of a file from disk) - and makes access of independent portions of the file (info vs audio data) much faster and easier. However, when you're dealing with parts of audio that can overlap or retain their previously removed portions, you can't just save one-file-per-channel like all other formats do. We've decided upon 3 different methods to saving a .wedt file, and all are selectable by the user in the Save panel (in versions previous to 1.4, there were only 2 made available to the user, and only presented under certain conditions).
Additionally, a smaller file was added in the package to allow the Open Panel to access the file info quicker. In versions previous to 1.4, the file containing the wavetables would have to be opened and quickly read in order to display the appropriate basic information about the file. In larger files this could take time and eat up unnecessary memory. Utilizing this smaller, meta-file makes the accessing of general file info in the Open panel much faster.