Cakewalk Sonar .wav import and Zoom H2

The best thing about the Internet, maybe, is that it instantly (instantly!) provides an answer to whatever weird question you might have about whatever. When it does not provide an answer though, I get bummed out. Then I have to try to figure out whatever it is myself, and anyway I’ve got some items now to give back to the pool of knowledge.

Here’s something weird I ran into a few weeks ago. I was using one of these:

Zoom H2 flash recorder

And recorded a wav (wave? WAV? it’s not clear how to spell this) at 44.1KHz 16bit. I copied the file to my PC and then imported it into Cakewalk Sonar.

Only I didn’t. It didn’t quite import. Sonar said that it did, and the track view altered slightly (little dots in the track that weren’t there before — see the image below), and a file appeared in the project’s audio folder, but there was no visible clip in the track view. And nothing to play back. No sound.

sonar tracks - empty and not quite

Top: track view before import. Bottom: track view after

So that was weird. Infuriating actually, I tried this in both X1 and 8.5 with the same result.

I don’t know what the cause of this issue was, but the workaround I settled on was to open the wav in Audacity and then export it. I exported it as the same thing it already was, a 44.1KHz 16 bit wav — in the Audacity export options, this was “WAV (Microsoft) signed 16 bit PCM.”

If I had to guess, which I have to since I don’t have any evidence at the moment, I would suspect that the Zoom H2 records WAVs as “Broadcast Wave Format,” which is like a normal WAVE but with metadata, and that Sonar doesn’t handle this correctly.

So that’s one way to deal with it. If you run into this and Google sends you here, see if that does it.

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