APack question

[DeadLily]

I used APack's AC3 Monitor to decode a 2.0 AC3 file into its separate channels. It gave me 6 files of various types, but each with a different suffix. (C, L, Ls, R, Rs, Sub) which I'm assuming represent the standard channels in a 5.1 mix. Yet oddly, while each file was exactly the same size, after importing them into Final Cut Pro, only 2 had content in them. What's confusing is that the two that had content were files C and L. What I'm wondering is:

- Why did APack make 6 files instead of 2, when it ackowledged that it was a 2.0 file?

- Why C and L instead of R and L? Is the L file really the left channel?

[WiseWeasel]

I just tried that, and I got my audio in the R and L channel output files (among the 4 others that were silent, including C). If you select the 'Stereo Downmix' option when you start the decoding, you should only have L and R output. If you want the audio combined into a single 2-channel AIFF, you can use something like mAC3dec to decode the AC3 to stereo AIFF...

[DeadLily]

Ok, checking the stereo mixdown box gets the results you mentioned, an L and an R file. But here's the other thing (which I neglected to mention before). The L file is a "Sound Designer II sound" file, but the R file is an "ASCII graphic document". The R file opens and plays fine within Final Cut Pro, but it seems strange that A.Pack would make a different file type for each channel.

[WiseWeasel]

I agree, it's very strange. Maybe something fishy is going on with the source AC3 file, as I've never seen that kind of behavior. What version of A.Pack are you using?

[DeadLily]

It's from DVDSP 1.5.. I've done it twice with two different 2.0 AC3 files. One which I made myself with the same APack, and one which resulted from a MTR 2.6 demux. The results were the same,

[WiseWeasel]

Ah, I'm using the one from DVDSP 2.0... Maybe there's some strange bug in the earlier one...

[DeadLily]

Hm. Well, someone pointed me to macAC3dec. and that works as expected. So I'm good.

[TugBoat]

Yea, the strange bug is that A.Pack 1.51 is not automagically adding the .sd2 extension to the files like A.Pack 1.53 does. So, whatever your system identifies the .R or .L extension file type as, is what it gets tagged as. Simply add the .sd2 extension to the end and that should fix it. Or do a get info on the .R, or whatever, and tag it as a QuickTime 6.52 file, then 'change all'. That should also fix it...permanently.